December 03, 2007
But wait, there's more!
Forgive me if I return to the well once again for a bit more from Mark Steyn on the Islamic threat.
In a bit of back and forth on National Review's The Corner, Steyn comments on the possibility that Muslims, like Christians, have already had their great reformation (although a few centuries after their New Testament brethren), and are now living with the unpleasant -- but entirely logical -- results.
What if we've already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it? It wasn't just Seventies Bryn Mawr Muslims who were "moderates". So were, comparatively, Muslims all over the world.
The Sudan's always been a nutty joint but you'd have had a harder time convincing anyone to jail an English schoolmarm over a teddy bear 50 years ago: The Prophet's authoritative cuddly-toy suras date back all of 20 minutes.
In 1950, a young Pakistani emigrating to Scotland or Canada would have received an education different only in degree, not (as now) wholly foreign in kind and ever more resistant even to the possibility of assimilation. One can detect similar trends in Indonesia, Singapore, the Central Asian stans, the Balkans - and among the de-assimilationist third generation Muslims in western Europe.
The Islamic "reformation" is, in a sense, the opposite of Christianity's. The Saudis have used their vast oil enrichment to promote themselves as a kind of Holy See for Muslims, and the Wahhabization of previously low-key syncretic localized Islams in almost every corner of the planet is testament to their success.
I look at the gazillions of dollars tossed into the great sucking maw of US "intelligence" agencies and I wonder why somewhere in the budget we couldn't put something aside to promote a bit of covert ideological rollback in Chechnya or Bosnia or Pakistan. But we're not that savvy, and God knows what unintended consequences would blow up in our faces.
And at one level the Islamist "reformation" makes perfect sense. After all, they look at Christianity's reformation and see that everywhere but the United States it led to the ebbing of faith and its banishment to the fringes of life.
The jihadist reformation is, as they see it, a rational response to the Christian one.
Rational and logical, if devout Muslims prefer to avoid the spiritual void that typifies much of the secular, Christian-in-name-only West. And a response that calls for a much more aggressive stance against the so-called corrupting influences of the non-Muslim world -- which ought to generate a commensurately vigorous push-back from the liberals in the secular, multi-culti First World crowd.
But no such response seems to be forthcoming, resulting in an emboldened take-a-mile mindset amongst the Muslim militants already seeking special treatment in their host nations, accommodations eagerly provided by the politically correct crowd.
Bad times, my friends, bad times, indeed.
Posted by Mike Lief at December 3, 2007 01:12 PM
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