Muslim culture clash — what happens now?

  • Well, I haven’t heard of any new Car­toon Jihad episodes, so maybe the whole thing is finally dying down. Pur­suant to this con­ver­sa­tion with Jim, which just inter­ested the heck out of me, I am won­der­ing what hap­pens at this point. Because I think the Mus­lim world is com­ing to a bit of a cri­sis point.

    They are try­ing to bring the whole world into cri­sis, but in spite of these weeks of riot­ing, mur­der and may­hem, it’s just not in their power to do. The essen­tial prob­lem is one of vision, and I think the Mus­lim powers-that-be are right in real­iz­ing that there can only be one win­ner. Either the West­ern world and the “global com­mu­nity” get to pro­mote the idea that no one nation­al­ity, race, creed or credo has pri­macy, or else they cave to the pres­sure of one reli­gion that believes that it’s their des­tiny to be dom­i­nant, and in so doing open the door for other reli­gions to demand that same sta­tus, lead­ing to the type of reli­gious wars that would hor­rify them com­pletely.

    If the West wins, the Mus­lims lose. There seem like a cou­ple deeply-held beliefs that the West is espousing.

    1. No reli­gion is any bet­ter than any other reli­gion. Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, Islam, Hin­duism et al are all enti­tled to the same amount of respect. And the word ‘respect’ here has a very spe­cific mean­ing. Namely, …
    2. …that “respect” also decrees that ulti­mately reli­gion should be viewed as a rather obso­lete ves­tige of prim­i­tive soci­eties. Reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism is out of place and com­pro­mises The Prime Direc­tive, that we all play together, because a devout believer will always want oth­ers to believe. Right now, a lot of the world’s cul­ture doesn’t hold much con­gress with true believ­ers of any stripe, though they think we’re quaint.

    All of these are drea­rily famil­iar — many West­ern­ers have given up the fight. Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists (by which I mean those with an active, intel­li­gent and deep Chris­t­ian faith) are ene­mies of the world’s cul­ture on this, and so in Amer­ica the Cul­ture War is fought every day, with Chris­tians being por­trayed as back­wards, unrea­son­able and stu­pid. As for the Mus­lims, in spite of what­ever power the imams and other desert tyrants hold over some groups, it is ulti­mately up to the peo­ple of these coun­tries to vote up or down on Westernization.

    Look­ing at the Car­toon Jihad, a per­son could assume that it’s a big NO vote. In spite of the riots being staged and prompted by Mus­lim preach­ers of hate (includ­ing com­ing up with fake car­toons that were worse than the orig­i­nals just to inflame the masses), I don’t see how it would be pos­si­ble to get this many peo­ple involved for this long if it wasn’t already a highly-charged issue wait­ing to explode (though of course say­ing that car­toons were the cause of all this is ludicrous).

    But I don’t think the vol­ley from the West has come yet. And just to thor­oughly unset­tle the Mus­lims, that vol­ley won’t come from weapons and troops, and it won’t come from infi­dels. This provo­ca­tion of Car­toon Riots seems to be aim­ing at get­ting the West­ern world to come out and fight like a man, to state their lousy ideas and duke it out. But the next gen­er­a­tion of their own peo­ple will prob­a­bly lose the bat­tle with­out ever real­iz­ing there was one.

    I’ll say it again. These guys just don’t know who they’re deal­ing with. The forces of West­ern­iza­tion (indus­tri­al­iza­tion, mod­ern­iza­tion) are more insid­i­ous than they know. It’s not the can­nons and grenades that they need to look out for; it’s the med­ical care and the fast food (as wit­nessed by protests like this one and this one.) It’s the goods and ser­vices, plus the promise of a bet­ter life and a chance to be heard, that bring every­one on-board.

    (By the way, in case it’s not obvi­ous yet, I’m not say­ing that I think these things are exactly right or exactly wrong. I sup­pose from a Chris­t­ian stand­point, it’s like watch­ing one of your worst ene­mies fight with another one. Kind of hard to know who to root for, since you’ll still be left fight­ing with the win­ner in any case.)

    When the colonists came to Amer­ica, they dis­cov­ered Native Amer­i­cans occu­py­ing the land. We all know that there were ugly episodes in the centuries-long res­o­lu­tion to that con­flict. But what is less often men­tioned is that even when whites were friendly with the tribes, the advent of West­ern inven­tions like guns and med­i­cines changed the cul­tures of the Amer-Indians with­out a shot in anger ever being fired.

    So if I was going to guess what hap­pens next (since my opinion’s prob­a­bly no worse than any­one else’s), I’d say:

    1. The riots will die down. In fact, I think they’ve started to already. The Mus­lims played a card, but they didn’t get a response that allows them to declare all-out war, and you can’t just keep riot­ing for­ever. (Again, I’m not say­ing that the Euro­pean ten­dency towards appease­ment is a good thing, IMHO, but given the cul­ture of the last fifty years, their inabil­ity to give any strong response to the Mus­lim vio­lence was pretty predictable.)
    2. Noth­ing at all will hap­pen for a while, while the Mus­lims fig­ure out that they destroyed a lot of their own prop­erty and killed some of their own people.
    3. The global com­mu­nity will try to insist on a few promises of bet­ter behav­ior, and essen­tially be told to blow it out their ear. They will be shocked into silence by this, though all around the world, oth­ers will chuckle.
    4. Some totally stu­pid words about peace, under­stand­ing, love and broth­er­hood will find their way out, after it’s safe to do so and entirely unlikely to make any real impres­sion. This will seem like Pure Wis­dom to the global com­mu­nity, and be widely reported as hav­ing great import. Actu­ally, it will have none. The orig­i­nal Gospel of Love was the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary idea in human his­tory. These latter-day fakes are about as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as your granny’s fluffy slippers.
    5. After some period of silence, a few drum­beats will sound from within the vast Mus­lim world. This peo­ple don’t have a prob­lem with cer­tain aspects of cap­i­tal­ism. That peo­ple don’t know why they can’t have an elec­tion. This peo­ple are tired of the pol­lu­tion of the oil fields. That peo­ple want to stage a non-violent con­sor­tium. All these lit­tle moves towards con­for­mity will be smiled on benev­o­lently by the West (unless there’s a chance that George Bush could receive some credit for it, in which case they’ll just report the news with no analy­sis what­so­ever, say­ing that it’s impos­si­ble to know what these things could mean.)
    6. Every­one will start to for­get there was a prob­lem. Mus­lims will start fight­ing among them­selves again.
    7. Other attempts at repelling sec­u­lar mate­ri­al­ism will occur from time to time, but with less­en­ing spon­tane­ity and increas­ing panic. They’ll be less well-organized, involve less diver­gent peo­ples and be greeted with­out alarm or even inter­est from the rest of the world.
    8. We’ll all be treated to lit­tle sto­ries on NPR about how the “old” school is at odds with the “new” school, and how inter­est­ing it is that Lit­tle Jameel has opened a tat­too par­lor in Elder Jameel’s bar­ber­shop, or how appeal­ing that Pak­istani women are mak­ing their hus­bands do the dishes, or how Libyans are fanat­i­cal U-2 fans. These reports will be tinged with sad­ness, and NPR will do a decent job of cat­a­logu­ing the elder generation’s griev­ances with the turn of events. But they’ll be at a loss to offer any con­so­la­tion besides four min­utes of airtime.

    The only thing that would inter­rupt that slow slide into atro­phy is some real excuse for war. Hard to know what that would be at this point. Many of the world’s bad guys have already said and done all they can, short of using nukes, which would, of course, change every­thing. But at this point, I don’t see how any of these guys can get nuclear weapons, or develop an arse­nal, with­out every­one know­ing what they’re up to.

    So in that way, we’re likely to just watch and wait, I suppose.

    By the way, via Ortho­doxy­To­day, here’s a Wall St. Jour­nal col­umn on “Clash of Civ­i­liza­tion”:

    In all the uproar, we find it telling that the two places where Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties have shown restraint and mod­er­a­tion is in the United States and Iraq. Amer­i­can Mus­lims are over­whelm­ingly mid­dle class, upwardly mobile and not very sus­cep­ti­ble to the atavis­tic urg­ings of dis­tant dic­ta­tor­ships. In Iraq, an unsi­lent major­ity has repeat­edly made its views plain about the reli­gious fanat­ics who demand to speak in their name. Just imag­ine the kind of anti-Western protests that would be tak­ing place there now if Sad­dam were still in power.


    Related posts:

    1. A gay Mus­lim movie
    2. Is this what the [bleep] is going on?
    3. Car­toon rage, cont.
    4. Bush’s great speech
    5. Why I don’t think the war is a failure

    February 18th, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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