The Learning Curve: How’s Your IQ (Islamic Quotient)?

The purpose of today’s blog entry is not to actually provide the fleshed-out skeleton of an IQ (Islamic Quotient), though that is a project whose concretization is dearly exigent in our time.

No, what we are here to do today is simply to adumbrate that skeleton with a rather hurried, if comprehensively sweeping, brush of forensic powder to bring out some of the salient features of a bold relief of what a more thorough écorché would yield.

The IQ (Islamic Quotient) test would measure where a person is situated on the Learning Curve of the Problem of Islam (the LCPOI).

The overarching vector of the Learning Curve pivots upon one question—what is the source of Muslim terrorism?—and its correct answer: Islam.

A person is at the very acme of the Learning Curve when he has had the epiphany that the cause of virtually all of the bad things that Muslims do—from grandiose attempts at genocide (e.g., the relentless slaughters of Hindus in the Middle Ages, the massacres of Greeks and Armenians in the 19th and 20th centuries, the ongoing carnage against black Africans in the Sudan from the 1980s to the present); to all the incidents of terrorism from the late 20th century to the hot present in which all reputable analysts attest that even worse attacks are being planned and plotted virtually anywhere on the planet; to all the examples of grotesquely violent and twisted applications of Islamic law, whether formally enforced by governments or whether privately put into practice by individuals, families, clans or tribes—is Islam itself.

As a corollary satellite to this acme, as it were, there is the slightly subtler epiphany radiating out from the primary, paramount one: that Islam itself as it has become actualized in history has been largely a spectacular kinesis of evil, and that this kinesis manifested itself, first and foremost, in the astonishingly swift spread of Islamic conquest outward from the Arabian peninsula westward across Africa into the Iberian peninsula in a matter of one century, eastward to conquer the Persian Empire and eventually India as well as the Insulindian archipelagos of southeast Asia reaching into the Pacific Ocean, and northward into southeast Europe and Central Asia, eventually (by the mid-15th century) to conquer the Eastern Roman Empire in its Christian Byzantine incarnation. This secondary epiphany of the Learning Curve is the recognition that these conquests were (and continue to be now even when constrained by the surrounding geopolitical limitations imposed by the modern West) unusually barbaric, cruel and violent (even for its time), and that the rule of Islam they imposed upon their subject populations was (and continues to be) intrinsically and institutionally hostile to modern Western human rights and constitutional structures.

After this twin epiphany is had, then comes the laborious and still largely autodidactic pedagogy by which the nature and form of Islam itself is explicated and differentiated in its many-splendored and ghastly complexity, even if certain of its more glaring particulars were likely to have partaken of, and informed, the catalyst that led there.

But—just as St. Augustine remarked that the parvula anicula (the little old lady with tennis shoes, so to speak) knows, in the simplex way she embraces the Gospel, as much theology as the most learned theologian—so we may say that the modern Infidel who has had the double epiphany that unveils Islam as the Problem has—on that basis alone (though he may continue to pick up the odd fact about Islam here and there as time goes along)—already attained all he needs to know to arm himself in the coming years and decades of this our most earnest and deadly War of Ideas of our era, and as a consequence stands shoulder to shoulder with his more dedicated and erudite brothers who have chosen to embark upon the toil and trouble of delving into the intricate and often bewildering mass of data that all told constitute the formidable diversity of the throbbing and metastatic tumor of that uniquely pathological eschatology that tumulted the centuries of a former epoch and now, after a brief slumber, threatens to convulse our own.

Conversely, we are, on a daily basis, made painfully aware of all those who have not yet attained the twin epiphany—much less have they bothered themselves with an authentic, politically incorrect study of the subject—, and who may be plotted, so to say, at various points along the Learning Curve. Some of these seem to be inching along in progress, slowly but surely (one hopes) approximating the acme; indeed, most of us who have had that Damascus experience can recall our former larval stages of growth toward it. Others of these (the clear majority, unfortunately) who fall short in the scheme of the Learning Curve seem to be stuck in the holding patterns of opinions or hypotheses that can be indefinitely self-sustaining and may only be shaken into reconfiguration or transfiguration by inordinately and tragically sufficient traumatic events.

One important type of Learning Curve tardigrade splits apart the double epiphany, in effect agreeing that, yes, Islam is the Problem—but only now, not throughout history, nor essentially; and thus the explication of its problematic nature must, logically, have recourse to factors other than the historical career of Islam, and certainly other than its essence. (These factors are usually reducible to geopolitical and economic dynamics, and invariably circle back to place all significant blame, in one way or another, upon the West—either in its classical Colonialism, or in its post-Colonialist geopolitics, or both.)

A subtype of this position might concede the problematic character of Islam throughout its 1,384 years, but—in order to preserve the non-negotiable axiom that Islam’s essence itself is blameless—it will explain that problematic history away with any number of devices: the eqo quoque argument, for example—namely, that we also were bad during our history, so hey, who are we to judge? One major assumption of the eqo quoque argument is of equivalence between Islam and the West, failing to note both the perdurance of Islam’s problematic history, with no appreciable signs of enlightened progress, but even rather of veritable regress or at best persistent stagnation, into our own present, as well as the ideological reasons for that perdurance that point to the essence of Islam and not just to accidental factors of history—not to mention the egregiously barbaric nature of Islamic behavior in history noticed by contemporaries and not just in anachronistic hindsight.

Now, the type and subtype discussed above may be representative either of the hopeful person inching his way in slow progress along the Learning Curve, or of the more obstinate person who is fixed in a holding pattern, far short of the acme, thereon. The former may well, with time, move from trying to find every explanation under the sun for the problematic nature of Islam except Islam itself, to that epiphany that it is, in fact, Islam itself that explains it. It is difficult to account for just how that movement, that epiphanic process, occurs: is it just the force of sheer data—the ever-renewing mountain of horrific data emanating out of the Muslim orbit—, and some particular datum amid that heaving mountain that proves to be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back? Or are there personal, perhaps psychological and/or ideological factors at play? In many, most, or all cases, the aetiological impetus may just be, ultimately, a mystery. That is not to say that the trigger for the epiphany is some kind of mystical experience unrelated to data; of course not. The mystery of subjective differences enters in when we contemplate the obvious fact that one man’s sufficient data to cause him to graduate to the acme of the Learning Curve might be indistinguishable—both in content and quantity—from another man’s data that proves insufficient to budge him from his holding pattern by which Islam and, of course, its vast majority of “moderate” Muslims, remains blameless and, therefore, irrelevant to the problems emanating out of Muslim culture.

The sober and sad fact that remains the case today is that the numbers of those who hold to the holding patterns that prevent them from graduating to the epiphany at the summit of the Learning Curve are the vast majority. And next down in numbers are those who are inching along in progress, but who have not yet seen the light. Needless to say, it is to be dearly desired that we lend a helping hand at least to those inching along, if not also to their less hopeful, more stubborn sluggards (though the latter are often, frankly, a waste of time, and nothing short of a rude and horrible shock will dislodge their tenacity).

To bridge the gap between those who have already attained that summit and those who are thus inching along in asymptotic progress or who seem stuck at various points along the graph, it behooves all of us to try to build up our arsenal of knowledge, as well as our rhetorical skills, in order to facilitate our fellow man’s matriculation along the Learning Curve. The creation of an Islamic Quotient questionnaire would be an indispensible tool for just this purpose, yet we few graduates of the Learning Curve have been remiss in failing to provide something like it—and those among us who have more means and influence have been unconscionably lax and/or ignorant in their myopia to this urgent need. (For another more particularized analysis of this aspect of our topic, see my previous essay, An Infidel’s Enchiridion: A Proposal—the “Enchiridion” in question being a compendium of knowledge about Islam for us to use specifically in debates against whitewashers, sugarcoaters and sophistical devil’s advocates of Islam; a compendium that would be far more elaborate than the Islamic Quotient questionnaire, yet still lean and mean in comparison with the luxuriant and organizationally incoherent mess of anti-Islamic literature that exists to date.)

I can dearly sympathize with those who have had the twin epiphany and who say that this is quite enough, thank you, for me to know that Islam is not fit for the modern world. But we are at war, and the War of Ideas is currently the most important phase of that war, and its enemy is not Islam, but a secondary enemy, PC Multiculturalism, an enemy that stands in our way from fully and rationally engaging our primary enemy, the carriers of an Islam Redivivus.