« The story behind the attack on UNIFIL outposts | Main | The Seattle terrorist attack »
July 28, 2006
The appeal of Islam to the self-loathing West
I had a discussion yesterday with a colleague about the novel Prayers for the Assassin, that posits a future where mass conversions to Islam occur in the aftermath of nuclear attacks on American cities -- while the Bible Belt remains reliably Christian.
My colleague expressed skepticism with the central conceit, that Americans would find the strict, text-based tenets of Islam appealing, especially given the seemingly growing hostility toward religion in general amongst much of the liberal public.
I responded that it seems to be liberals, or as I prefer to think of them, Moonbats, who seek spiritual fulfillment, responding to a feeling of loss, of an emptiness at their spiritual core, that sends them babbling into the arms of the Scientologists, the Moonies, the New-Age Crystal Clubs and Transcendental Navel Gazing societies, while recoiling from the strictures of traditional Judeo-Christian religions.
Of course, Mark Steyn comes along to point out that converts to Islam are enthusiastic jihadis, and the appeal to non-Muslims seems to be growing despite -- or because of? -- the war against the West.
In 2002, I asked a Muslim in Paris why Islam was the fastest-growing religion in the West and he said four out of five converts in Europe were women, positing therefrom that, aside from spousal conversions, significant numbers of western females found the feminist notion of womanhood degrading and unworthy. But, whether or not that's true, it doesn't seem to be the whole story.
In Britain, there are high-profile celebrity conversions--star footballers, Asquith's great-granddaughter, the son of the BBC director-general, and the Earl of Yarborough, who now goes by the name Abdul Mateen, though whether Burke's Peerage will list him as such remains to be seen.
This makes Islam sound like the Brit equivalent of Richard Gere Buddhism. It's not. It's bigger.
Over on the other side of the world, about 200,000 Filipinos in the Manila area are estimated to have converted to Islam. This is in addition to the four million Filipino Muslims in the south of the country. The raw math is quite impressive: aside from its surging birthrate, Islam has managed to increase its population by five per cent just through conversion.
I wonder what the equivalent numbers would look like for Norway or Belgium--or Ontario.
Taking the prize for chutzpah (if they'll forgive the expression), the Canadian Islamic Congress has conceded some young Muslim men may have assimilation issues but feels the best solution is if the government hands over a big pile of cash so it can run some research on "integration." I think that money could be better spent identifying the types of imams these young chaps are attracted to.
But the problem goes beyond the Muslim community and cuts to the heart of what Canada is, or believes itself to be: "Radical Islamism," wrote Fouad Ajami recently, "has come to mock the very principle of nationality and citizenship." But is that really so hard to do? Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking.
[...]
The jihad is everything the multiculti left's flopped at. The left talked up sappy Benetton-ad one-worldism, while the pan-Islamists got on with their own particular strain of one-worldism, fierce, implacable and slipping across borders with ease.
Meanwhile, the UCC and other post-Christian churches long ago decided the Gospel was a bore and if they could no longer convert the unbelieving to Christ, they could at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left political clichés. Yet if the purpose of the modern church is to be a cutting-edge political pacesetter, it's Islam that's doing the better job.
The contemporary mosque or madrasah is not the place to go for spiritual contemplation so much as political motivation. The Muslim identity of those gold-toothed Punjabi yobs in northern England or Berber pseudo-rappers in French suburbs may seem spiritually vestigial but it's politically potent.
Pre-modern Islam beats postmodern Christianity--and, for young men in search of an identity, transnational jihad beats multicultural nullity. There's no amount of taxpayer money you could throw at the Canadian Islamic Congress that would satisfactorily explain just what it is in contemporary Canada Steven Chand is supposed to identify with.
It's interesting to note that the meme of "education and the eradication of poverty will end the appeal of jihad," something I hear from the Left as a solution to the "Why do they hate us?" problem, always seems to miss the fact that the 9-11 hijackers were from wealthy families, were well educated, and had been exposed to all that the West had to offer.
Unfortunately, all that money, education and international travel may have served to increase the perceived injustice of a dissolute West, filled with sinful and disrespectful unbelievers who mock the Koran and its tenets, infidels who prosper and succeed while the Muslim world remains mired in repression and war.
And yet . . . .
The only hopeful note in this mournful symphony, this funereal dirge for the West, is the growing numbers in the evangelical churches, and the Catholic Church, in the Third World. While the if-it-feels-good-do-it liberal churches see their membership decline, and the anything-goes Church of England moves closer to shuttering its vacant, unused sanctuaries, the faiths that demand more of their followers seem to be gaining converts, too, and not just the imams, but priests and pastors, too.
Say what you will, but I'm not hearing about Evangelical Christians and their fundamentalist brethren blowing themselves up in pizza parlors.
But I'm afraid that in the race to win new converts, the nihilistic mullahs are winning, and that scares the hell out of me.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 28, 2006 06:48 AM
| TrackBack
Comments
Islam is not the fastest growing religion in the US, for example, Buddhism grows faster than Islam, as do some other, smaller faiths, and evangelical Christianity has a far higher growth rate than all of them.
Of course, with Islam and some of the other "exotic" religions, it's hard to say how much of it comes through conversions and how much through immigration and then the high fertility rates of immigrants.
Posted by: patung at July 28, 2006 03:13 PM