Islam Redivivus—Part Two

I will now adumbrate the 1,384-year career of Islam. This will illustrate the sense of applying the term ‘redivivus’ to the pathologies emanating out of the Muslim world today.

1) Out of the weltering backwardness and savagery of the Arabian culture in the early 7th century A.D., the Prophet Mohammed ingeniously transforms Arabian polytheism into a monotheism whose monomaniacal logic focuses the energies of Arabs.

2) Mohammed proceeds to harness this focus to use his small band (his Ikhwan or ‘Brotherhood’) of Arabs to conquer and swallow up all Arab tribes on the Peninsula (in the meantime fighting Jews and Christians).

3) Mohammed proceeds to try to conquer the entire Ecumene, with the express goal being to put the world under Islamic rule in order to prepare the world for the end of history and its transformation into the eternal eschaton.

4) The recalcitrance of the real world, of course, resists Mohammed’s eschatological pothos.

5) After Mohammed’s death, his successors, inflamed by the same eschatological zeal and militaristic imperialism by which to pragmatically further that zeal, continue his attempts to conquer the world, and are, similarly, limited by the various forms of recalcitrance of the real world.

6) The various forms of recalcitrance of the real world include not only the resistance of some of those whom Muslims sought to conquer, but also include internecine factors within the expanding Islam itself.

7) Notwithstanding the various forms of recalcitrance of the real world, Islam expands at an astonishing velocity and over a stupendous extent of geographical space. It is arguable that the Islamic empire far exceeded, in geographical extent, in temporal duration and in fanatical devotion, those of Alexander the Great or of the Romans. Though constantly beset by internecine pressures and limitations, nevertheless the eschatopathological entelechy that guides Islam’s imperialistic voracity continued to motivate Islam and to ensure its concrete and successful expansion over territories spanning from the Atlantic coast of Spain and North Africa all the way to the archipelagos of Southeast Asia, and most places in between, including the astonishingly colossal conquests of Persia and India, not to mention Spain and Byzantium.

8) At some point, Islam’s expansionist voracity begins to slow down, and it subsides into an indefinitely temporary acceptance that it will not conquer the entire world. This acceptance is due to the three factors of:

a) the centrifugal pressures of internecine conflicts and ambitions

b) the formidable resistance and entrenchment of Europe proper, holding its ground as Islam digs into its Western flank (Spain) and its Eastern flank (the Balkans and northwest Asia Minor)

c) the sheer fact that it had already spread so far and wide already.

9) Though Islam’s expansionist voracity subsided by the 13th century, this does not mean it was stable and mellow after that: Muslims would continue to attack the West and would continue to try to penetrate Europe, most particularly at its Eastern flank as the center of power of Islam began to be relocated with the Turkish dynasty. Similarly, staggering inroads continued to be made in central Asia and India, as well as Southeast Asia and central Africa.

10) The pattern typified by the paradoxical dynamic of #8-9 above continued to govern Islam, until a new global geopolitical dynamic appeared on the world scene: the rise of Western superiority. This began roughly in the 16th century, perhaps not entirely coincidentally with the re-conquest of Spain (1492) by Spanish and European allies, finally taking back all of Spain from the Muslims after eight centuries of Islamic domination.

11) Western superiority began in the 16th century, then increased at an amazingly exponential rate with each passing century—manifesting this superiority on nearly every level conceivable: technological, scientific, military, legal, political, philosophical, social and cultural. By the time the Muslims attempted their last significant offensive against Europe, attacking Vienna in 1683, Europe was progressing at such a rapid rate that with another century after that, Islam had become a corrupt, regressive and relatively impotent ghetto of the world and French forces under Napoleon, for example, could stride over its countries as though playing in a sandbox (not without a few fierce battles, of course). Beginning in the 17th century also, the West began its worldwide Colonialism, eating away at the Muslim World from all sides, and increasingly rendering it subservient to a new world economy.

12) One mistake the West made during this period was to more or less permit the Muslim World to retreat into itself and hunker down as a kind of contracted version of its former glorious self, thereby allowing and even encouraging its cultural pathologies to fester in humiliation and frustration at this unprecedented turning of the tables. The West should have simply conquered the entire Muslim World and dismantled the Islam that constitutes its totalitarian cultural texture. The West could have done this easily by the 18th century, or any time up to the end of World War I.

13) Unfortunately, the West did not conquer the Muslim World, but let it hunker down in festering pathologies that, given its cultural imperatives to conquer the world in the name of its divine mandate of eschatological supremacy, would have to rear their ugly heads sooner or later.

14) In the meantime, the West underwent severe pathologies of its own:

a) pathologies that resulted in two catastrophic World Wars and a deadly Cold War in the 20th century, the Second of those World Wars and the Cold War due to Gnostic immanentizations of the eschaton;

b) the pathology of PC Multiculturalism and its undetachable corollary of the excessive self-criticism of the West by Westerners afflicted with this pathology.

15) Also in the meantime, major parts of the Muslim World inherited through sheer geological accident vast amounts of oil and became billionaires, and now trillionaires, virtually overnight.

16) The late 20th century saw the dissemination of technology which even backward Muslims can use in order to further their jihadist goals.

17) The creation of the state of Israel has galvanized the inveterate hatred of Muslims around the world, whose volatile passions cannot tolerate a piece of Islamic land being re-taken not only by Infidels (that would be bad enough) but by Jews (even worse). The subsequent geopolitical nexus between Israel and America (the latter increasingly seen, rightfully, as the spearhead of Western superiority in the world) has also aggravated this “Little Jihad” (as Hugh Fitzgerald terms it) against Israel which, in turn, fans the flames of the revival of the “Greater Jihad” (ib.) against the entire world first catalyzed by the Prophet Mohammed some 1,380 years ago.

18) Beginning in earnest in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and coinciding with the unprecedented and disastrous dismantling of Western Colonialism (a process that would take decades to fully realize itself), untold numbers of Muslims were allowed and even encouraged to immigrate deep within the West, such that by the turn of the 21st century, there flourished millions of Muslims throughout the West, with mosques and Muslim organizations being set up like ant colonies everywhere, from the depths of Mississippi and Texas, to Canada, to Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and on and on and on.

This is not to mention as part of this process the deep infiltration of Muslims into various strata and interstices of Western societies -- not merely as clerks in 7-11 stores or as taxi drivers, but throughout schools as teachers and administrators, throughout Academe as professors and heads of departments, throughout police forces, firefighter organizations, government offices (municipal and federal, in all levels from clerical and administrative to actual governance), throughout legal institutsion (as clerks, lawyers and judges), throughout various forms of industry from food processing to power plants to white collar businesses, in pop culture media from the news to television to cinema, and even in our intelligence agencies and our militaries. This process of allowing, and even encouraging, this unprecedented influx of millions of Muslims has, by the paradoxical perversity of PC MC, only increased post-911.

19) Finally, into this inflammable mix was injected the 911 terrorist attack, and all the subsequent concatenation of events, including America’s response, the dominantly PC counter-responses of the anti-American West, and the escalating and emboldened resumption of the ancient Jihad against the entire world: Islam Redivivus.

20) The coordination and unified consciousness of Islam Redivivus as it stands currently is still not as cohesive and crystallized as it could be, in Pan-Islamic terms. Many factors militate against such a Pan-Islamic cohesion.

We shall explore these factors in Part Three.