The
Decline and Fall of Islam |
By Alan
Caruba (October 2003)
Islam
is dying. In its death throes, it has turned not just on its perceived
enemies, the modern world, but upon itself, killing with seeming
indifference both Muslim and non-Muslim as it thrashes about, filling each
day with new corpses, the last of which will be its own.
It
took hundreds of years for the Roman Empire to be built and to come to an
end. During that long period in the early history of Western civilization,
the populations under its control throughout the Mediterranean and up into
England were largely permitted to worship any of the many gods in local
areas, although they were expected to also honor the state gods of Rome.
By 312
AD, the emperor Constantine began his ascendancy, attributing it to the
God of the Christians and, in 325 AD, he called the Council of Nicaea, the
first council of bishops to formalize a Christian creed. After that,
Christianity, one of many faiths in the vast empire began its path toward
becoming, not just the religion of the empire, but one that now numbers
more than two billion people worldwide.
In 610
AD, Mohammed began to create Islam to gain control over the desert tribes
of Arabia. He built his religion on the wealth acquired through raids on
caravans and attacks on cities such as Medina and Mecca. Islam’s text,
the Koran, was said to supercede both the Old and New Testaments,
disputing the laws of Judaism and the divinity of Jesus.
Following
Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, the religion, a warrior cult built around
adoration of Mohammed, quickly spread throughout North Africa and into
Spain. Today, Islam is estimated to have more than 1.2 billion adherents
around the world, although most are largely located in the Middle East and
Africa. There are some 31 million in Europe, more than 845 million
throughout Asia, and 323 million in Africa. A little over a million are in
South America and approximately 2.9 million in North America. It remains a
distinctly "Arab" religion.
Islam
has literally been at war with all other religions since its inception. It
looks at the world as being divided between Islam (Dar es Islam) and the
world of the infidel, (Dar es Harb) the unbeliever, the world of war. The
central prayer of Islam, the Kalima, spoken daily, states "There is
no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet." Mohammed said,
"The sword is the key to Heaven and Hell." By contrast, six
hundred years earlier, Jesus said, "He who lives by the sword shall
perish by the sword."
A
Muslim’s first allegiance is to Islam. One’s nationality and other
allegiances are secondary. In the latter half of the last century, Middle
Eastern Arabs strove to establish a national identity and it proved a
failure from its inception. In late October, 35 heads of state gathered
for a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in an effort
to achieve a unified voice for Islam and to try to offset perceptions that
Islam is linked to the violence being perpetrated worldwide. Observers,
however, note that the OIC is unified only in its support for the
Palestinian attacks on Israel. In his welcoming speech, Mahathir Mohamad,
Prime Minister of Malasia, told attendees that Jews "rule the
world" and are to blame for all of the woes of Muslims. Absurd as
this may seem to non-Muslims, it is integral to Islam and how Muslims
perceive the world.
With
considerable irony, Libyan rule, Col. Muammar Al-Qaddafi, speaking in
early October, said, "Today, you cannot speak of Arab unity and
pan-Arab nationalism," adding "The Arabs have become the joke of
the world because they do not think of their future." But the Arab
leaders of Saudi Arabia, Palestine, the Persians of Iran, and other Muslim
nations who have funded and unleashed the Islamic Jihad are thinking of
the future; the future of Islam.
Since
the birth of the Islamic revolution, begun by the late Ayatollah Khomeini
of Iran, Islam has been attempting to conquer the modern world by the
sword. Despite the schism between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam,
both are united in this quest. Jihad or holy war, in the words of Paul
Fregosi, an expert on Islam, is "essentially a permanent state of
hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world."
Islam
is losing its war on the world. We are witnessing the earliest stages of
its decline, although historians would probably mark that from the end of
the Ottoman Empire after World War I when the Western allies divided the
Middle East into new nations and areas of economic imperialism.
Islam,
however, is the primary reason that the Middle East has long been a
cesspool of ignorance, poverty, and oppression. A religion that insists
that the only thing worthy of study is the Koran leaves entire generations
ignorant of modern science, of the music and literature of other cultures,
of true world history. Even Islamic scholars are beginning to openly warn
that the path on which it has set itself long ago can only lead to its
predictable decline and end.
A
recent study by the London-based Transparency International found that
Middle Eastern and North African nations form the world’s most corrupt
region. Twelve nations out of a rating of 133 come from that region. Among
them were Libya, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Sudan, and Algeria. The
study defined corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain,
ranging from misuse of public power for private benefit to bribery; not
exactly the kind of nations that attract foreign investment. Only the
invasion of Iraq to rid it of Saddam has opened opportunities to
restructure it into a modern nation.
Most
Westerners are unaware that Islam is unable to adapt, to change, and to
evolve. These attributes have been the hallmarks of the world’s oldest
monotheistic religion, Judaism, and of Christianity which experienced its
own Reformation. Instead, Islam is locked into the dictates of the Koran
and of the Hadith, a collection of observations based on the life of
Mohammed whose rules dictate the most minute and intimate aspects of a
Muslim’s life. The death of Islam was written into its birth.
The
daily reports of acts of Islamic terrorism seem to defy a rational
explanation, but there is a pattern emerging. First is the hatred focused
on Israel, a nation based on the belief that Jews, like other ethnic or
religious groups, have a right to their own country. Following the
Holocaust of World War II, the survivors and those who had subscribed to
Zionism, a movement to reestablish Israel, wrested a tiny piece of
Palestine, a British protectorate. They declared their sovereignty in 1948
and the attacks on Israel by Muslims before and since then have never
ceased.
Nothing
frightens Muslims more than the very existence of Jews, a people whom the
Koran repeatedly identifies as the primary enemy of Islam; a people seen
to be allied with their other enemy, Christianity.
If
Muslims fail to destroy Israel and its long history as the birthplace of
Jesus and Christianity, that means Allah has failed. If Allah fails, Islam
fails with him for Allah is neither the Jewish, nor Christian God.
Another
part of the pattern that has emerged is the Islamic attack on America
along with Western civilization and its institutions. The West with its
tradition of tolerance, of secular government, of a capitalist economy, is
seen as a threat to Islamic law as applied throughout the Middle East.
Carefully selected for destruction, the World Trade Center in New York was
targeted first in 1993 and again in 2001 as the ultimate symbol of the
West.
The
war on the West now becomes clearer as Muslims attack its institutions,
chief among which is the United Nations. The attacks on diplomats are yet
another sign of the indifference to ancient traditions protecting those
entrusted to do the work of international resolution of conflicts. When
you take diplomats hostage or kill them, you threaten the very sinews of
civilization. Even the timid conglomeration called the European Union is
reluctantly concluding they must protect themselves against Islam’s
jihad though, typically, they would prefer accommodation than
self-defense.
A
further sign of Islam’s decline can be seen in the way Muslim nations
that align themselves with the West also find themselves under attack to
bring them into line with Islam’s ultimate objective of world
domination. These attacks are acts of desperation and come not from
nations, but from the core of Islamic fundamentalists.
The
perfect metaphor of Islam is the suicide-bomber, killing himself as he
kills others.
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