A couple of new YouTube videos making the rounds talks about the Islamic strategy to take over the world. They talk about how over the last 1,400 years, Islam has spread its tentacles nearly everywhere, slowly increasing its political influence. Mullahs in these videos prophesy, while beating their chests, that Islam will take over Europe and fly its flag over the White House. Sharia will rule the world. It is assumed that Muslim men are forever ready to die and to claim their 72 virgins, once in heaven.
The horror of ISIS’s actions has been made palpable in its own videos. And it is understandable that non-Muslims should react viscerally to the actions of fanatical Muslims in the Near East and elsewhere. But some perspective is necessary. It is even possible to say that not all the bad news is real.
Recently news about ISIS demanding that all women between 11 and 46 years old undergo genital mutilation became the talk of the blogosphere and was widely reported in the international media. Female genital mutilation is mostly a problem in African countries, so the world would be right to pay attention to any news that shows wider enforcement of a horrible custom in an area already afflicted with religious fanaticism and tribalism. Even those who quite rightly don’t want to get their own military entangled in the internal issues of foreign countries would be justified in criticizing practices that are inhuman.
The result is a growing anti-Muslim mass hysteria and an intellectual climate that the military-industrial complex wants.
Alas, not many people paused to verify whether the news related to genital mutilation was authentic, or to check whether there was someone else apart from a lone UN official to support its validity. How easy or acceptable would it have been if the media had written a similar accusation, about some other group, without confirming the authenticity of the report?
But thirteen years after 9/11 — a period during which talking about Islam has been taken out of the realm of political correctness — one can expect to get away with saying the most outrageous things against Muslims without a need to verify the information, before critically examining it. As with several news items like that regarding genital mutilation, even if the news is eventually proven to be false, in the minds of those who accepted it first without critical examination, it will have left an undefined hatred and repulsion against Muslims.
The result is a growing anti-Muslim mass hysteria and an intellectual climate that the military-industrial complex wants. By compromising our capacity for critical examination, we make ourselves gullible and vulnerable to manipulation, sacrificing the very foundations of Western civilization. At the minimum our judgements of the risks we face and solutions we see are erroneous.
I am no fan of Islam. Neither am I a fan of Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Neither am I a fan of the tribal, narrow-mindedness and high time-preference lifestyle of a large proportion of many of those in the African continent. Neither am I a fan of nationalism, a new-age religion to which a large section of Americans is extremely prone.
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I have nothing against “religions” as long as they attempt to explore the spiritual nature of life. But ritualistic religions based on a system of concrete beliefs are an antithesis of spirituality and discourage thinking.
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As I write this, Muslims are being butchered in Myanmar and in Sri Lanka by the much-esteemed Buddhists, for no reason that a rational mind can understand. But isn’t Islam a more fanatical religion? In the sea of irrationality, it can be hard to know which of these formal religions has been worse. Only a century back the Christian nations were killing tens of millions of their own kind in two “great” wars, and even today African tribes kill hundreds of thousands for no good reason. Chinese killed tens of millions of their own. Cambodians killed 25% of their population. Massive killings and pain were suffered in South America and Russia. A few hundred thousand innocent people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were incinerated by the US. And in suicide bombing those who have shown extraordinary performance are not Muslims but Japanese kamikaze pilots. In recent times the concept was revived by a Hindu organisation, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
What Islam suffers from is generally the reality of life in all poor societies: their irrationality, a cultural existence that has not gone through an age of reason and the age of enlightenment. I have no interest in defending Islam from its problems. It has its own, some very specific to it. But there are some that are taken out of context. So let’s get a perspective on some of those.
In my city in India, businesses complain that Muslims must go to pray twice during working hours. I ask them why they don’t hire Hindus instead. The response I get is that Hindus come drunk in the morning, if they come at all. Alcoholism is a massive problem in most of the poor parts of Eastern Europe and Africa. Drug addiction and alcoholism, albeit not yet officially recognized, are an increasing and major problem among Hindus in India. Ironically, in the popular culture, it is Muslims who have the bad name: for their prohibition against alcohol.
In some Islamic countries, women are not able to attend universities. They are not allowed to have sexual relations when they want, with whom they want, because many Muslim men are obsessed with virginity. Misogyny rules the roost. Men control what women wear. This is the commonly understood narrative in the West. But while men get all the blame, in reality much of the control over women in these societies is conducted by elder women. In the Western media such information is often expressed by using the passive form, perhaps to cater to the needs of those in the Western feminist movement who never want any blame to go expressly to women. Indeed, besides the military-industrial complex, a certain strand of the Western feminist movement takes pride in demonizing Muslims, perhaps because some people caught in that strand want to feel better about themselves. For some women in the West, casual sex, peer pressure that urges them to work even when they don’t want to, the routine of day care for children, and, very importantly, the need of western governments to collect taxes from more bodies have brought more burdens than happiness.
Virginity is indeed valued in poor societies, not just among Muslims. But in some communities in the US as many as 70% or more of babies are born out of wedlock, with the average being 40%. This is a major social problem leading to disintegration of families, which ironically Muslims rightly recognize, calling it “decadence.” In rich societies social welfare programs, albeit in a very corrupt way, take the place of the missing dads. In poor societies, women cannot afford to be single mothers. Parents of such girls are paranoid about their getting pregnant, because bringing up children is very expensive. But can they not use contraception? Contraception is expensive for those earning $1 a day, and still carries the risks of pregnancy and disease. For poor people this risk, however small, is simply not worth the fun — these societies are mostly attuned to survival, not happiness or pleasure, anyway. To put this in perspective: half of births in the US are unintended.
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A deeper reflection on the above might show that examining an alien culture’s social problems without understanding the broader context can be grossly misleading. Should you work for “liberating” women in such societies? Are you more likely to destabilize their societies, making the situation of women worse? Do the problems of women exist in isolation from the problems of men, children, and the elderly? Or do they exist in a balance within their cultural and economic context? Should you shovel democracy and western institutions down their throat? Or would such imposition — if not preceded by an intellectual renaissance — only confuse them, killing their capacity to develop the cultural ingredients to develop such institutions on their own?
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But isn’t what women wear in Islamic countries particularly restrictive?
Not only in Islamic countries but in many Western countries as well, women are expected to show a higher level of modesty. In most of the US, it is permissible for men to go topless but not for women. Depending on their society, people have different senses of shame. Not all forms of distinctive dress for women — or men — are necessarily signs of male domination. One might want to visit Turkey, Malaysia, and even Indonesia, to see whether Islam is necessarily in opposition to modern life.
We grow up with idiosyncrasies of our own culture and don’t see them as such. In India and China, both of which are considered to be on the front line in dealing with Islamic fanaticism, a very large proportion of women are missing: babies relegated to the dustbin, put under the leg of the bed soon after birth, buried alive, not looked after when sick, or aborted because they were female. Why isolate Muslims as particularly bad?
But what about chest thumping mullahs who want to bring the West under sharia law? Such people have existed in all religions and in all regions. Moreover, new immigrants to the West, particularly the so-called educated — from Mexico, Africa, China, India, and elsewhere, including Muslims — have a tendency to vote for collectivist public policies, ironically directing the politics of their new home toward what made their original country wretched. A majority of Western women, who mostly got the right to vote in the last century, have voted for collectivist policies, increased social welfare, police, and state control. The result is that the US has increasingly turned into a militarized police state. They achieved this without much “help” from Islam.
When you hear about mass killings, the reality is usually not that the society is murderous, but that it is just too sheepish and emotionally broken.
One does see armed gangs and in some cases real armies beheading people on TV in Iraq and elsewhere in that region. Such gangs succeed not because individuals and communities, despite the other sins and irrationalities that blossom in a tyrannical society, directly approve of such criminality. They happen because most of the society is so completely broken, superstitious, irrational, and sheepish that it does not resist or fight back. Yes, when you hear about mass killings, the reality is usually not that the society is murderous, but that it is just too sheepish and emotionally broken. The average Muslim, however irrational he might be, still cares for his family and has no interest in killing others.
The Middle East is dotted with American bases, where America has historically tried to influence the region’s culture and politics. What would Americans think if there were a Muslim army stationed outside New York? One might even ask if it is not the sign of sheepishness that some people in the Middle East don’t hate America.
Almost certainly such wretched societies seriously lack the organizational power to take over the world, if they can even conceptualize that. Were this not the case, Israel — a country of a mere 7 million people — would never have come into existence. Many people in the Islamic world have no clue about the US, apart from drones and occupying forces. But the same people have problems identifying major cities in their own neighbourhood. Mostly they don’t know what their neighboring countries are. They just don’t have the intellectual ingredients to imagine expanding Islam to take over the world.
Islamic societies’ biggest problem is not fanaticism but irrationality and superstitions. That is the reason they are poor. Thousands are killed in fights between Shia and Sunni. Some are killed because they refuse to change their religion. But torture, pain, wretchedness, and systemic corruption are a part of day-to-day, moment-to-moment life in most of the world outside the West. Most of these people are born in virtual slavery, wallowing in disease and tyranny. Might-is-right is the operating principle in most of the world, from Islamic countries to China, to Africa, to India. Millions of people in these regions die needlessly every year, their deaths unreported in the media. Why blame only Islam?
More than Islam, what the West should worry about is the increasing irrationalities in the West itself, loss of critical examination in the intellectual space, and an increasing influence of cultural Marxist values — values that are the antithesis of what made the West great but are today posing as what underpins Western civilization.
