Readers, you know me. Balanced in all things I have always maintained an even-handed attitude to radical Islamism. There's bad and there's good. On the one hand, radical Islamists can be a bit rigid in their thinking; they aren't altogether tolerant of opposing points of view. Some of them, too, believe that blowing up people on trains is fine. On the other hand... ummm, on the other hand... there was something... hang on... Oh, anyway, a balanced view is what I've always previously taken.
Not any more. In this matter as in every other there are limits, and when on Sunday I came across the following quote from Sayyid Qutb, expressing his opinion about jazz, I reached mine:
... a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies - their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal...As you'll appreciate, any outlook in which so sublime a product of the human musical genius as jazz; in which the tradition that has given us not only Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, not only Monk and Coltrane, not only Clifford Brown and Miles Davis and Bill Evans and Stan Getz and Billie Holiday and Ella and Sonny Rollins... well, you see what I'm saying; any such outlook must be seriously flawed.
Oh, and Erroll Garner.