Although the topic covered by my three-part posting, an “Islam Redivivus”, has many more complexities to unfold beyond what I will accomplish, I have decided to limit myself in the analysis.
Each of the 20 points I listed in Part Two, for example, could be considerably amplified. Also, many other significant points could be interspersed among, or added to, those 20. For instance, the military-imperialistic expansion of Islam, with its kaleidoscopic mosaics of internecine conflicts, is an arc of history of extraordinary complexity.
Nevertheless, the simplicity behind the complexity is, on one level, of equal, if not of a higher, importance: that unifying simplicity being the deformed entelechy of eschatological jihad—a simplicity that continues to inform the diversity of Islam in our day, a distracting diversity which politically correct apologists and pundits, however, find so infinitely comforting in their efforts to stave off, or obfuscate, the uncomfortably unifying factor—which they slyly caricature and then as a simplistic straw man dismiss as “monolithic”—behind the diversity.
At some later date, I may well revisit this three-part analysis and sketch in a little more light and shadow.
For now, I will conclude the analysis by picking up on the questions raised by the final, 20th point of Part Two:
Why is the coordination and unified consciousness of an Islam Redivivus as it stands currently still not as cohesive and crystallized as it could be, in Pan-Islamic terms? What factors militate against such a Pan-Islamic cohesion?
These questions point to the fact that, to put it in colloquial terms, Islam Redivivus is not a done deal. It is, rather, still a process, still a specter, not a full-blown fact. Were Islam Redivivus a full-blown fact, we would see a far worse, more geographically disparate, and far more coordinated concatenation of terrorist commando missions wreaking havoc in various key nerve centers—followed by a vast coalition of actual Muslim armies threatening all-out war against the head of the world’s Infidels, the West (with its crown being the U.S.A.).
We of course don’t see this. We haven’t seen this for years—at least 300 years. Why not? It’s a good question to ask me, since, according to my own assertions in Parts One and Two, Islam has an entelechy to conquer the world that may be characterized by the following adjectives:
a) traditional
b) essential
c) divinely mandated
d) eschatological
e) fanatically pathological
f) voracious.
Each one of these descriptors could be unpacked, but left as they are, they communicate at least a patent conundrum: if an ideology that unifies over one billion people is based upon this entelechy as described by these adjectives, why in the world are they not currently engaged in trying to conquer the world in more blatant, frontal terms? And furthermore, why haven’t they been trying to conquer the world for the last 300 years?
Well, in Part Two, we intimated a couple of cogent explanations. Before we get to those, some may argue that Muslims are, in fact, trying to conquer the world now. This argument, however, is perforce required to offer a new and unprecedented definition of civilizational conquest: one, to wit, where one civilization can, and proceeds to, conquer without using military means. The non-military (and mostly non-physically-violent) tactics purportedly being used by Muslims involve the two prongs of Daw'a (the Islamic equivalent of evangelization, but with Muslims employing a considerable amount of deceptive whitewashing and sugarcoating of their own anti-liberal tenets and violent history), and of population growth both through using their women as “baby factories” and through large-scale immigration into the lands of Infidels. This argument—framed by the neologism Stealth Jihad—would get us into a complicated issue some of whose problems I have dealt with in another essay, "Stealth Jihad" and Violent Jihad.
Suffice it to say that my take on this is that, while I agree this is happening as a semi-conscious project on the part of innumerable Muslims world-wide, it nevertheless suffers from two liabilities:
1) So far, it is being conducted in a largely incoherent, semi-conscious fashion following the amorphous dictates of tradition and culture; not as a coherent, unified “grand plan” with specific tactics apportioned out in terms of direct memos among hundreds of millions of Muslims, even if innumerable Muslims are indeed trying to do so (most notably various alphabet-soup arms of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the West): this doesn’t mean it won’t have great effect; it just means it won’t have as great—and as decisive—an effect as it could.
2) Secondly, no (realistic) amount of Islamic evangelizing and demographic inundation could hope to bring about the actual conquest of the West: Islamic values run so counter to the modern liberal values of the West and are, as such, so vulnerable to inferiorities that hamper and hobble their ability to excel even in their primary goal of hateful enmity, that it will be only a matter of time before the PC idiots who currently dominate Western culture will wake up and recoil at this penetration and presence.
This is not to say that when that day comes (and if no concerted project of bona fide conquest has been undertaken in the meanwhile by Muslims), it will not be a horribly messy situation the West finds itself in, having to extricate Islam from its midst at an egregiously and ridiculously late date, when it could have done so much more easily—and much more humanely (for all those handwringers out there in, and out, of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement)—at an earlier stage. It is rather to say that only an attempt at full-blown conquest—using a combination of terrorism and military invasion—would even begin to be within the general vicinity of the ballpark of standing a chance against a civilization as solid, complex, strong, sophisticated and ethically healthy as is the modern West. Even then, it is not currently conceivable that even if Muslims became far more unified than they now are and marshalled vast armies, they could still stand a chance against the military establishments of a vastly superior West.
Okay, back to the main question which we interrupted with our virtual parenthesis:
Why is Islam not sufficiently Pan-Islamic now, and why is Islam not trying to conquer, in flagrante, the world? We shall now unpack the question using our tried and true method of adumbration:
1) The astonishing rise of Western global superiority, beginning in the 17th century, increasingly, and with a rate thereafter of exponential augmentation, has mortifyingly cramped the style of Islam which, meanwhile, has descended into an abysmally pathetic welter of inferiority on all levels (only cosmetically obscured here and there by its undeserved, and Western-helped, oil wealth).
2) As implied in #1, the force on the world stage of Western superiority became stronger and more extensive with each passing century after the 17th century, and the rate of increase sped up, such that the spectacular and dizzying progress of the West accomplished, by the 19th century, in mere decades what it had taken a full century to do before.
3) This West that has become so superior in global terms—of truly historically unprecedented proportions—is, furthermore, a West that embodies values that are in most ways profoundly inimical to the values of Islam: this makes the superiority of the West a provocation of a ‘clash’ of world-views. If the modern West had values more in synch with Islamic values—say, if Hitler, who admired the militarism, totalitarian intolerance and paranoid xenophobia of Islamic culture, had won World War II and the West were now dominated by a Nazi world-view—then the superiority of the West would not be such a limiting factor on the expanse of Islam: rather, the two civilizations would likely achieve a ready symbiosis (not without some Trotskyitically internecine violence here and there along the way, of course).
4) While the current clash of values between the two world-views of Islam and the modern West is being temporarily obscured in too many ways by the idiocy of political correctness (which, sadly, dominates our culture for now), this ridiculous state of affairs is relatively recent—running the course of perhaps the last 60 years or so. It is the consequence of a cultural sea change in the West that has occurred since the end of World War II (though it has complex roots in our past before that). Prior to World War II, the West had little problem in hampering and hemming in Islam not only for geopolitical and economic reasons, but also for ethical reasons: the British just before First World War went to war against African Muslims (even if ostensibly black, mostly of Arab stock) who refused to give up the practice of slavery against black Africans: a young Churchill accompanied one or more of those military campaigns, and he wrote of his observations of the savage backwardness of Islamic culture at the time. Churchill was not ostracized and excoriated by his fellow Westerners for his ‘Islamophobia’ or his ‘racism’. We are now, sadly, in a political climate where England or its geopolitical successor America would never dream of invading the Sudan—where the divinely mandated Islamic practices of abominable jihad and slavery have been raging for decades now—for the express purpose of putting a stop to a project boldly and clearly identified as ‘Mohammedan’. No, the modern West now, with its ideologically deformed international vehicle the United Nations, must grope around for some politically correct rationale by which to try to put a stop to a religiously motivated project of mass-murder, mass-rape and mass-slavery of black Africans, rather than opting for the sane and humane rationale based on the simple observation that Islam, when put into logical practice and power, results in hideously grotesque crimes against humanity.
5) As the kernel of my fourth point above implies, the West before it became recently crippled by PC Multiculturalism, managed to exert its global superiority in many ways that concretely and consciously (if not always flawlessly) hampered and hobbled Islam.
6) Islam’s intrinsically internecine nature was exacerbated by its unprecedented situation, caused by a surrounding ocean of Western superiority beginning in the 17th century, of being forced to withdraw into itself and hunker down: as a result, Islam became even more internally divided, more corrupt, more toxic and deformed in ways that ate away at its unity.
7) Finally, although there exists in Islam a powerful cultural resistance against succumbing to the influence of Infidel cultures—all of which Muslims consider as evil temptations, but those of the modern West (dominated by evil Jews as they believe it to be) the most evil of all—nevertheless, this past century has seen a remarkable amount of seduction and insinuation of Western ways, styles and values into the hearts and minds of untold numbers of Muslims. Whether this insinuation really penetrates deeply enough to dislodge the powerfully hypnotic totalitarian brainwashing of Islam is open to debate: nevertheless, the many insidious and attractive tentacles of the Western world-view have infiltrated into the Muslim World and Mind, at least sufficiently to exert significantly divisive and disorienting effects—which, at the very least, and to our utilitarian benefit, helps to augment the pathological tendency in Islamic culture and in the Islamic psychology for purist takfir (i.e., the paranoid suspicion that a given Muslim or Muslim group is not sufficiently "pure" Islamically, and so must be considered an enemy) among myriad Muslim groups.
Conclusion:
The militant Muslims of our day in the 21st century are hoping to revive the authentic and mainstream Islam of its glory days, when it was able to strut about militarily without being forced, through weakness, to have to skulk about forming terror cells and otherwise pretending to be "moderate" in order lay stealthy tentacles for future terror attacks in the absence of outright military invasion.
For the reasons intimated by our adumbration above, Muslims are not there yet. Islam Redivivus is not yet a done deal, though it is definitely, and emphatically, a desideratum among them worldwide. It is thus an ongoing project, and even if it never succeeds—and I believe it is very unlikely to succeed, given the historically unprecedented strength and sophistication of the enemy it despises, the modern West—its zealous and fanatical pursuit will likely result, in the years and decades ahead, in the mass-murders of countless innocent people, as well as related physical injuries and mental anguish of survivors, ongoing psychological anxiety and tension of the general populace, social and infrastructure dislocations, and possibly outbreaks of disease if some of the attacks wreak sufficient havoc.
As with most horrible tragedies of history, it is usually not by the successful realization of a twisted idea that people will suffer, but merely by the attempt at realizing that idea. Hitler, Stalin and Mao all failed to realize their vision: but consider the horrific toll they wrought merely in trying, but failing, to succeed.
Let us hope that our current politically correct myopia is dispelled soon enough to at least minimize the unnecessary and tragic casualties that will result. And let us hope that WWIII will have fewer needless casualties than did WWII. Is that too much to hope for?
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