If you lived in 11th century London around the time when Harold Godwinson was making the mistake of leaving too many troops in the north, your life was rather shabby compared to the life of a man living in Damascus or Samarra. This was the Golden Age of Islam. The Muslims were on the cutting edge of commerce, math, science and economics. If you were looking down from above, Islam looked like a winner.
Granted, the Muslim advance into Europe had been halted, but they still controlled large parts of Europe and controlled the Mediterranean. As a practical matter, just in terms of peace and prosperity, Islam looked like a superior model to what existed in Christendom and Asia. It was not just at the top either. Literacy rates, and life expectancy were much higher in the caliphate than anywhere else.
Fast forward 200 years and life in London would not have changed much. The typical peasant would have had a life similar to his ancestors under someone like William the Conqueror. To the East, however, little guys on ponies had defeated the armies of Europe and were poised to drive all the way to the Atlantic. The armies of the Batu Khan had smashed the Rus and were ready to ride to Paris.
To the south, those same guys from Asia were sacking Baghdad, burning its libraries and murdering most of the male citizens, while impregnating the females. Historians estimate that a million citizens of Baghdad were killed in one week. The destruction was so massive, the population of the region did not recover until the 19th century. The Mongol Invasion ended the Golden Age of Islam.
By the 14th century, Islam was still dominant in what we call the Arab world, but it was not producing or even augmenting an ascendant culture and people. In fact, as the culture of the Near and Middle East collapsed, it took Islam with it, turning it into a tool for jostling between clans and tribes. The Muslims held on militarily through the 20th century, but that was largely due to the Turks and their long involvement in Europe going back to antiquity.
Even so, by the late Middle Ages, life in the typical European village was not that much better than life in the typical Muslim village. If you just looked at the top, the Ottoman Turks looked strongest, but the seeds of decline were apparent. While the West was on the cusp of great technological, cultural and financial revolutions, the Ottomans were still running a system Diocletian would have understood.
As the West moved from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern Period, it was about to rocket ahead of the rest of the world technologically, culturally and military. The typical villager in Europe was living a vastly more prosperous life than his contemporary in Baghdad or Tripoli. The religion, the culture, the demographics and even the climate all came together to produce what we know to be the modern world – in Europe.
Islam never made it out of the Middle Ages until Western prosperity overflowed its cups and brought material wealth to the Arab world. Even so, Iraq is still a Medieval society equipped with satellite dishes and mobile phones. Their culture, economics and politics remain locked in the amber of a bygone age. Even their revolutionaries sound like extras from a B-movie about the Crusades.
That’s not just a reality we in the West accept. It is a reality that every Muslim from the Arab world faces and grapples with every day. The culture that produced him lost to the culture that confronts him. No one stands in line for the latest Muslim mobile phone. There is no Muslim Silicon Valley. The armies of Allah throw rocks at the space ships and lasers of the infidel. To be a Muslim is to be a loser.
That daily reality is in his pocket when he looks at his cell phone. It is on TV where all the actors wear Western clothes. It is in his house where his sister demands to wear makeup and live on her own, dating men outside the family. Even at mosque he is reminded that he is on the losing side of the fight. He rides a Western made bus or drives a Western made car. He texts his coreligionists on an Apple iPhone, not a Mohammad Phone.
There is an argument that Islam is on the rise. As we see Muslims pouring into Europe and even America, the argument goes, Islam is like rising flood waters, about to wash away the West. That misses what’s happening at the roots of Muslim culture. Every one of those Muslims is on a journey that will end as it did for John the Savage in Brave New World.
The Muslim defines himself by his family relations. He is everyone who came before him. His culture is their culture and their culture defines him. Those Muslims on the road to Berlin can either abandon themselves and their identity in order to join their new world, or, they can embrace death. The self-detonation phenomenon is just a dramatic way of choosing the latter.
The thing is, both choices have the same implication, the death of Islam as an organizing philosophy. Just as the Muslim is faced with the reality of assimilation, Islam is faced with the same choice. Islam can cut itself lose from its past and embrace the material world of Western culture or it can blow itself up in a last final act of vengeance against the victor. Either way, Islam is dying.
The Sunni-Shia war that is centered in Syria is perhaps the way forward so Islam can evolve and become a workable mode of thought in a modern technological world. Like the Thirty years War, maybe old Islam is burning itself out and what comes next is a lighter, personal version of Islam. The Thirty Years War left large chunks of central Europe depopulated and others reduced to cannibalism so these transformations carry a heavy price.
Islam is collapsing and it could very well take the rest of us with it. The central challenge to leaders of the West is how to manage this civilizational collapse, which primarily means containing it. The past year has been about piety contests over who can invite the most Muslims in for settlement. The coming decade will be about who can keep the most Muslims out of the West.
Wonderful, cogent analysis. Not at all what Muslims want to hear, but what they need to admit. Islam is an anachronism that modern humanity simply cannot and will not tolerate for long. The rigid rules that brought order to 7th century Arabia, at the price of personal freedom, just have no place in the modern world. Successful societies of today are founded upon the principles of inalienable, Universal human rights. Muslims must either accept these principles as the price of prosperity and progress, or reject them and isolate themselves.
Whatever choice they make, Islam loses in the long run. The ideology will either be assimilated into the modern viewpoint of the rest of humanity, or it will isolate itself in the name of preservation and cease to have any relevance for the rest of the world.
Many modern Muslims may well resent the fact that nearly everything they own, down to their socks and their printed Korans, comes from the technology of the West they despise as of Satan. For the true believer, that only breeds resentment, not the desire to give up Islam and assimilate into modernity.
Include that in your calculations – along with Europe’s leftists seeking to fundamentally transform the morally spent continent through mass importation of these resentful, unassimilable Muslims and their Allah-given right to breed at will with Europe’s women and enslave its men – and there’s a good chance that they can’t lose.
The approaching richly deserved extermination of all Zeropeans
by their beloved islamic “guests” will be an extremely pleasant spectacle to watch…In contrast, look at Juste un Trou D’Eau importing of a mere 25,000 mud slimes…nothing really…All of them are first only women and children with a qualified husband waiting in the wing…Unemployment of muslims in Europe is near 100%, while in Canada it’s 100% EMPLOYMENT! In the region here they ALL have a job, no wonder, they are doctors or engineers(a doctor in the umma is paid $50 a month, here it’s $20,000!)
Lots of terrorist doctors and engineers in ISIS in case you are blind to that fact. It is a myth to believe Muslims will stop being terrorists once they all have jobs.
Pingback: The Bookworm Beat 12/31/15 — Out with the old edition and Open Thread
“Literacy rates, and life expectancy were much higher in the caliphate than anywhere else.”
This was due to the inherited achievements of the advanced civilizations they conquered (the Byzantine Middle East and Africa, Persia, and Aryan India), not because of any “Golden Age” of Islam. After several generations, these societies began the long decline.
I’ll believe that Islam is dying out when the number of Moslem-majority countries starts declining.
There was no Golden Age of Islam, in the same sense of Golden Age of Greece or Rome or Golden Age of Western Civilization. The Golden Age of Islam is a myth. Islam is a culture subjugator, culture stealer, culture annihilator. There is precious little to show for themselves after 1400 years that they didn’t steal from a culture they swallowed whole. I often hear that Islam discovered the concept of zero. Not true. Zero is a Hindu concept. Same goes for many of the discoveries/inventions that are bandied about as springing from Moslems, they are ideas that were stolen from subjugated cultures. It’s hard to create and contribute to the human race when you’re busy destroying all that doesn’t comport with your poisonous ideology.
Islam continues to advance because we are weak in the face of their certitude. Time to wake up.
Exactly, there was no muslim golden age as there was no golden age of Romans and Greeks as every Greek, Romans or mud-slime had twenty slaves to carry their disgusting lazy asses…Take slavery away and they all instantly collapsed…Petroleum has replaced slaves recently but it’s only for short term…Price of oil go down now and watch the mud-slimes collapse along with it…Obama just gave 200 billions to the Iranians…How long will that make them last? As long as the Saudi scum, not very long!
Dear zman, you seem to be stuck in a paradigm.
You’re saying that the very fact that their culture uses modern technology but doesn’t manufacture it means Islam is weak. It might mean their culture is next to useless but not that it’s weak. You seem to conflate their pathetic economic state (which means only that their economy is weak and unlikely to get better) with the state of Islam.
That’s like saying that Christianity is weak in the Philippines simply because they’re poor (but devout). It makes no sense, sorry.
The muslims in Pakistan and in Arab countries are aggressive and aggressively Islamic. Islam is very strong within them and is rising. That economically and technologically they’re nowhere doesn’t change a thing, especially not when it comes to their ability to colonize the West, a West which offers them a great deal of money to come over.
Their birthrates are astonishingly high. In Britain their numbers keep doubling every few years. At last count they were about 5% of the population but 10% of the babies born in Britain were Muslim!!! The active element within the Muslim population is extraordinarily aggressive in promoting Islam. Islam is flourishing even as their people hardly work and make little money. It’s time for you to ditch your paradigm, which seems to blind you to all this.
It isn’t as though they’re leaving Islam when they come to the West.
Mr. Z,
What about places like Malmo or Molenbeek or Rotherham?
They’ve had some success in the short term turning parts of Europe into subsidized ghettoes. One could look at the history of the black ghetto in America and expect the Muslims to do similar.
Which, granted, is not “winning.” But neither is it going away.
Rotherham may be a cultural sh*thole with lots of islam’s finest adherents, but it isn’t all muslim by a long chalk. There are plenty of whites living there who know what’s going on. It’s just that the people who run the town don’t want to upset the muslims.
Weirdly, a lot of the whites however still vote for that town council…
Based on birthrates though, they’ll outbreed the whites and eventually completely own it.
Muslim birth rates are an interesting topic. In their homelands, fertility rates have been dropping over the last decade. In the West, a baby boom was profitable and manageable because of the high value human capital. In the Arab lands, this baby boom is going to be a catastrophe. It’s not even when they reach old age. A society full of low-IQ middle-aged people is going to be a mess.
Muslim birth rates in the West are another matter and they will eventually have to be addressed, but like every other aspect of this crisis, it starts with containment.
They still have very high birthrates in Arab countries. Last time I saw the statistics on the average age, it was clear that theirs is not an aging population. It’s anything but.
And a muslim Arab society full of young people will be a bigger mess than one full of middle aged people
In one sense you are right, Z, but in another sense the problem still doesn’t go away. I have long said that islam is a death cult but while it may be a suicide cult in some ways it is also very determined to take lot of non-muslims with them.
There is a good reason that many of Islam’s religious zealots demand that their young people don’t watch television or listen to music (I recall one ‘spiritual leader’ who called for muslim young men not to play football — the world variety — as it would apparently distract them from their prayers and I suppose with it, the mindless devotion to the people who sit at the top). But if they are going to invade the west, and play with the west’s toys, then it is inevitable what hold these muslim ‘leaders’ have on the rabble will slowly lose strength.
On the other hand there are ‘revivals’ which appeal to the ignorant. Islam is capable of reviving, in a fantasy ideal, some long-lost or never existing reality of some idealised, perfect religion. These ‘leaders’ are also clever in some ways in being able to turn the west’s creations on itself (Planes are flying bombs, cell phones are remote electrical impulses and so on) and clever enough not to injure themselves, so they use people — especially those with learning difficulties (and given Islam’s preference for in-breeding there’s no shortage) to do the actual killing or detonating. There are plenty of them to be sacrificed too, and if they believe that their god rewards them with virgins however unspecified the gender or creature then there will be no shortage of volunteers.
Muslims say that if we convert to islam there will be no trouble, though that dodges the question which branch you join as muslims routinely kill other muslims without thought, depending on their interpretation of some minor aspect of the cult. So as I say, they may be headed for the dustbin of history but they will go down kicking and clawing and screaming. It is this that I don’t think the west should allow near them.
…As an aside, Harold may have been right to leave troops in the north of England as the greater threat to his crown was the Danes and not the newly arrived Normans. Harold had all but won the Battle of Hastings (Senlac Hill, to be exact) when against his orders his troops broke ranks and charged down the hill after the retreating Normans, who turned and hacked the disorganised English to bits. A classic case of having troops who thought the prospect of plunder was better than staying in their strong position. Still, William’s success gave England the Domesday book and allowed us years later to have a record of what the country had then. Useful, but I am not sure muslims will bring what William’s people did..
Didn’t Harold take an arrow in the eye? Kill the king and the battle is lost? ( Memory from 60 years ago.)
Dan Kurt
Hey!
If you squint your eyes just a tiny bit, sounds like your writing about the human extinction movement aka the cultural Marxist’s.
Maybe that is why the stupid motherfuckers are so desperate to import as many musloids into the west as they can.
Persian and Byzantine civilization were advanced for their time, but they still operated at the pace of an ox-cart. The Arabs could be successful parasites because the communities they were taking over were pretty simple to operate. Not even a Muslim could louse them up so badly they’d freeze up. That’s not the case with the Western world.
Like Taggart Transcontinental, the modern western world is a delicate piece of machinery. Just think of everything that has to work correctly to keep you sitting at your computer in your heated apartment. And think of how quickly it can all evaporate if one little thing goes wrong. If the electric grid collapses, or trucks stop making deliveries. Muslims might be dreaming of “ruling” a rich west, but the Age of Islam would probably last no more than months before the whole thing grinds to a halt. Then the Arab “conquerors” would be starving along with the defeated infidels.
As well as the rest of the world, at least if America, Canada and Australia and other agricultural exporters are conquered. We’ve seen what would happen in the fates of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Sort of related “The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle-East” by Timur Kuran describes the process of how the inability to adapt Islamic law ended up crippling the Islamic world.
Historically the Arabs have been very successful parasites. If they conquer Europe, they can spend a long time sucking it dry. They spent 600 years or so feeding on Byzantine and Persian civilization before the Mongols and the Turks knocked their dicks in the dirt. (And they converted the Mongols that stayed and the Turks to Islam.)
As some commenter at another blog I have long since forgotten the name of pointed out, a lot of the guys who contributed to the brilliance of Islamic civilization might have been named something along the lines of Abdullah al Iskandria, but their dad or grandad was probably named Theophilus of Alexandria.
If containment fails and Europe falls, then I think they’ll be around for awhile.
My hunch on the Arabs is they are never as strong as they or as weak as they look. Right now they have a surplus of young males and they are facing a West that is run by women. But, they remain a backward people with a culture that is falling apart. A decade from now all those young males will be middle aged.
Maybe you haven’t been paying attention to Muslim birthrates in Europe. They continue to be young men, they have so many children and there’s no real slowdown.
The Arabs– well, the Muslim ones at least– are definitely weaker than they look, thanks to 1400 years of Islam-fostered cousin marriage, resulting in an IQ of 85 or so, give or take a few points depending on the specific country you are looking at. Unfortunately, the inbreeding has also bestowed upon them a low, savage cunning; so while they are genetically weak, you absolutely cannot turn your backs on them. Every few hundred years they attempt to fix their gene pool the only way they know how: invading infidel lands, and raping and/or enslaving their women. Unfortunately, that moment has come back around again on the wheel of time, as so many unfortunate Swedish women are discovering.
Pingback: The Death of Islam | IowaDawg Blogging Stuff
Not sure I agree. What if ISIS succeeds? What if they get their Calliphate, take over Europe and much of the Middle East?
Apparently I did not read the same column you did.
ISIS would have trouble running a 7-11.