Posted on 12/04/2002 7:26:52 AM PST by Lyford
The Coming Islamic Implosion
One of the most consistently interesting and original writers on the war on terror is David Warren, a columnist for Canada's Southam news chain. Warren grew up in Pakistan, and spent many years working and traveling in Southeast Asia. He knows the Islamic world well - has wide contacts there - and writes with both fairness and passion about the turmoil it is going through. Last month, he delivered a brilliant lecture at the University of Toronto on the future of Islam.
One passage made an especially sharp impression on me:
"It is a commonplace today that Christians in the West have lost their faith, whereas Muslims in the East are still believers; that what we now have is a confrontation between decadent post-Christian secularists, and sincere if possibly misguided Muslims. The first part of this proposition often seems true enough, especially of contemporary Europe. But I really think the second proposition is false. I think one of the reasons Islamism has erupted with such gale force in the Muslim world is indeed the very loss of faith, and the fear that comes from this. ...
"It is in moments of doubt that one often makes the wildest, most desperate, professions of faith; and in a way Osama bin Laden is doing this within his own person, and calling to fellow Muslims who are experiencing the same dark night of the soul. It is as if they were confronting not us, but instead Allah, and saying, 'Show us! Prove to us you still exist; because, if you don't, we will give up on you entirely.'
"At the edges of that Muslim world today, there is much, chiefly anti-Christian violence: in the Philippines, Indonesia, in Nigeria, Sudan, and across Africa, in the Trans-Caucasus and elsewhere. But part of the reason for this, I have come to realize, is the very success of the new Christian missionaries. They are coming today not from Europe and America as they once did, but from churches now indigenous to Africa and Asia. For in the grand statistical overview of the present day world, Islam is expanding by its birth-rate alone, it is not making many converts; whereas, paradoxically, it is Christianity that is now spreading like wildfires from many different centres in the Third World, both by birth-rate and by conversion."
If Warren is right, what we are witnessing - and suffering from - today is a kind of Islamic supernova, a last furious bombardment of radiation from a star that has already gone dead and will very soon go dark.
Encouraging comments. I've always wanted to witness a supernova.
We were created by God to obey His commandments and worship only Him. God tells us we will be rewarded if we do, and punished if we don't.
Whatever replaces Islam as our punishment will be painfully worse. (Yes that is possible!)
The worst of the witch trials and persecutions in Christian history occurred, not during the medieval period when the Church was unquestioned, but during the century or so after Luther. There would seem to be some truth to the notion that religions, like other institutions, are the most prone to lash out when under severe stress.
I don't think so.
Perhaps but... the old order fears most of all change.
They fear the creeping infiltration of decadent western culture into the Islamic societies. They fear that like the west that has entirely lost the moral way, Islamic society will also become sinful and immoral.
Those who are Moslems and travel, and who know that all in the west is not as sinful as the movies an TV make it appear, are not particularly upset. It is the underclasses, the gray thobes (blue collars) who see only massive and repulsive sin who think the west must be destroyed so their children will not be doomed to the hell of western sinful influence.
New York is seen as sin incarnate. Bill Clinton, leader of the western world was found guilty of extremely perverse actions in the very office where he wields power. He was guilty.He was not punished. He was approved by an adoring nation who are there fore guilty of the same sins and perversions.
Bandar's speeches say "we want to modernize, but not to westernize" This statement reflects the views of the Saudi public. They want modern convenience but not all the undesirable western baggage that comes with it.
Osama hates the Royal Sauds. He knows the conflict can tear the country asunder. Osama desires power and like his Catholic counterparts in European history, is using the power of religion to inflame the pious but ignorant masses to revolt and to achieve his political goals. He knows also that the educated business classes will not go along with his program so the Saudi business classes must come to destruction also.
Osama has been extremely successful. He has caused the American press, who is totally ignortant, to make dupes of Americans. Free Republic is a great example of duped people. The hatred and total misunderstanding is quite contrary to the normal through digestion that takes place with most issues.
It is truly an important era. The Islamic Reformation.
SUPERNOVA, almost lightspeed.
As to having anything to do with Islam, I'd say your Nova is faster than a surrendering Iraqi.
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