Sign of Weakness

Submitted by Bruno (France), Sep 26, 2006 at 11:46

The Salman rushdie affair was the first sign maybe that pointed to the lack of confidence of muslims in their own faith : having to resort to death threats for mere allusions in a novel is poor behaviour indeed. That a lunatic announced this fatwa is one thing, but the most important thing to note is that a wide majority of muslims approved the move. We westerners did not pay attention to what was the very early sign of Islam's sickness and beginning disintegration.

To understand how such a culture can die, you have to understand that Islam lived mostly by itself for centuries, living more and more self-segregated in its own geographical area along the years. At the beginning of this religion, shortly after the death of the self-appointed prophet, the muslim culture still benefited of the energy of the culture on which it expanded by conquest (pre-islamic cultures around the mediteranean, pre-islamic India and others...) that's mostly why Islam may appear as having been through a golden age in those times.

But when the remains of Civilization evaporated in their cultural zone, with muslims having ethnic-cleansed most non-muslims from their territories along the centuries, their civilization went more and more anemic and even more unable to face the challenges of the modern world that the 18th, 19th and 20th century brought.

when this muslim world was abruptly confronted in the second half of the 20th century with the modern world (through rapid exchanges and movements of populations, satellite TV and the internet) to the rest of the world, that was a shock . Nothing in their culture could help them to cope with the problems they suddenly faced to try to catch the train modernity, of freedom of speech . They could not stand this sudden afflux of free world ideas and world culture that made them feel so miserable about the total failure (cultural, economical, scientifical, democratic, sexual and other....) of their own self-segregated world.

That's when they reacted with this rather comical fatwa against Rushdie (I am afraid these muslim zealots do not even guess how ridiculous they are). This was the first of many events that will lead to the death and collapse of this culture. In the human history, such events (as the collapse of a major religion) are very rare and it is very interesting to watch as it will unwind. The bad side of all of this is that they will try to bring many people in their fall, not only muslims (the vast majority of the casualties will be muslims-by-muslims though) and that it will take 10 to 30 years probably.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".