Fundamentaist Islam is economically unsustainable

Submitted by Prashant (United States), Nov 8, 2012 at 01:52

Dear Dr Pipes:

I agree with you and your reader Shishir from UAE that president Obama's victory is a sad news fro Israel. It is also bad news for all people around the world who value freedom. But I doubt that President Obama is intentionally helping Islamists take power in the Islamic countries. Because I am absolutely sure that whatever is happening in the middle east is, one, bad for fundamentalist Islam in the long run and, two, is a necessary step toward bringing meaningful and real changes to Islam.

I will explain. Fundamentalist Islam as preached by those who shoot at 14 years old girls or prevent women from driving or scream for more rights without pleading for more responsibility, is an economically unsustainable system. In general, any system that does not give power to people to think and express is bound to collapse. So, the more Islamic countries are ruled by fundamentalists, the sooner they will collapse economically. In fact, the demise of fundamentalists had already occurred if oil-wealth had not flown into middle east.

For the fundamentalists to be ultimately defeated, they will need to win in the short run. If anyone forces a woman not to drive or prevents a man from thinking freely (etc), then we must raise arms to stop him. That is what we will do if such a thing happens on a small scale in one of our cities. But we cannot raise arms against fundamentalists of Islam because they are sheltered under a religious umbrella. As sad as it is, we will have to allow them to be as bad as they want to be until the first spark against them comes from inside the Islamic society. Only last week an Islamic school in India banned use of cell phones by female students. How long will it take before someone revolts against this idiocy? One of these girls is going to tweet a call for revolt or one of these girls will quietly change her religion. It is just a matter of time.

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