Tom Facchine – Send Them Back To The Stone Age

			In a 1968 memoir,
		

			there was a United States Air Force General called his name was Curtis LeMay. You know, the United
States was involved in the Vietnam War at the time. And reflecting on it. He said, you know, instead
of negotiating with the Vietnamese, we should have just bombed them back to the Stone Age. That was
the phrase that he used.
		

			This phrase actually came up again, the war on terror. Maybe some of you remember, there was
allegedly an exchange between Pervez Musharraf, the late President shot off. And the US official
Richard Armitage, who apparently said, basically, you have to join the war on terror, or else we're
going to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age.
		

			Now, that's a really intense phrase, okay, and a lot is going on there. The barbarity and the hubris
and the arrogance and stuff like that. But there's one specific thread that's hidden in that phrase
that I want to kind of pull out and bring to your attention. And that's the understanding of time.
Okay, the idea that you could take someone who their calendar says the same calendar date that I
have in my phone, 2023. And by doing something to them, I can actually take them up out of time and
move them back on some sort of scale, and throw them all the way back to the Stone Age.
		

			Interesting.
		

			That sort of threat, that sort of phrase has certain assumptions behind it, and the assumptions
behind they're actually really, really important to what we're trying to do here. And Tokyo
Community Center, what we're trying to do as a Muslim community in North America,
		

			one of the assumptions that's hidden in that quote, is that the idea of what is the modern world,
it's built on technology, it's built on infrastructure, you think about roads, you think about
gadgets, we've got my show all these cool, you know, cameras, and these tablets, and these sorts of
things, fun, new things. And what's hidden in the quote is that, well, if I can just, you know,
* those things away from you, I send you right back to the Stone Age. Now, there's some
problems with that kind of assumption. And there's a few of them. So one of them, it under
emphasizes or doesn't give sufficient credit to some of the technical, illogical advancements that
		

			previous civilizations have had. Right, some that still remained to this day unmatched, we've got
Roman roads that are better than New York roads, at least, right. And they've figured out, you know,
geologists, they've looked at Roman concrete, and somehow, the way that they mix their concrete with
the passage of time and erosion actually adds to the strength of the concrete, as opposed to what we
see people using today for their building materials. You know, the pyramids are such a miracle that,
you know, they think that maybe aliens helped out or something like that, they can't really accept
that this is something that people back then could pull off, could do. So it's not just when we talk
		

			about bombing someone of the Stone Age or some people back, cave dwellers a stone age, we're not
just describing facts, here, we're actually making some sort of claim we're claiming that now is the
best possible world that you could live in. And that anything in the past Well, it's the Stone Age,
it's bad, it's backwards, it's inadequate, it needs to be updated. And so if you don't get with the
program, if someone's threatening to bomb you back to the Stone Age, they're basically saying, I'm
gonna wipe out all of your progress, you're gonna have to start back again from zero.
		

			It's interesting that that's kind of a triumphant narrative, right? It's like, well, we've just
added and added and added and added and we've got all these things that we keep on adding to our
value as human beings or our civilization, our or our group. But why don't we think of the
liabilities? Why don't we think of the drawbacks and the negatives? Why don't we think of impending
nuclear war? Why don't we think of housing crisis? Why don't we think of food deserts? Why don't we
think of environmental disaster, somehow that stuff gets wiped away, and it's not considered part of
the modern world, or at least not emblematic of the modern world? What's emblematic of the modern
		

			world is the microphones and the gadgets and all the fun stuff. We don't think what's pushed to the
side all of the bad stuff. And so to understand the place of Islam in the modern world, and the
place of this community in the modern world, it's actually a tough task. We have to describe
something that we're inside of. It's like if you ask the fish to describe water,
		

			I would imagine the fish would probably say, what's that?
		

			If that's the only thing that you know, you're swimming in it, you're constantly surrounded by it
every single second of every single day. It's hard to grasp what exactly it is. And only through
going through something else can you actually understand
		

			Uh, what you're talking about? So we can't just take at face value these sorts of things that people
say, you know, we live in the best time and modern technology and you don't want to go back to those
days do you? We need to be a little bit more critical than that. Because if the received
understanding of the modern world is right, if we are living in the best possible time, the best
possible place the pinnacle of progress. Well wait a second, that causes some really significant
theological problems. The Quran was sent to us in the past. The Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi
wa salam lived in the past, Islam, the best generation of human beings was in the past. So if we're
		

			going to treat the past as just some bad stone age thing we don't want to return to.
		

			We've closed ourselves off to learning from the past, and assume that we can only leave it behind.
		

			No, it's not us that needs to change with the times. As the saying goes, maybe it's the times that
needs to change with us.
		

			So instead of trying to fit take a slam and fit it and mutilate it into modern sensibilities, recent
sensibilities, maybe we need to shine a light and start questioning some of these modern
sensibilities and investigate how Islam actually provides answers to modern predicaments in
interesting ways.