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The Appeal of Islam - Islamism is a Reaction to
Multiculturalism

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 07:54 PM PST

To understand the danger posed by Islam, one must first
understand its Islam. And I don't mean its spiritual appeal, because Islam
is not a particularly spiritual belief system. It is not really much of a
belief system at all, so much as it is a tool of social organization.
Because Islam is far less concerned with what people believe, than with
what they do. It is not so much of a religion, as a means of ordering
behavior within a society along particular lines.

But let's look beyond technical language like that, to see what
the appeal of Islam is for the "Muslim World". Islam was born out of the
Arab Middle East, but not just any part of it. Not out of the parts of it
heavily influenced by the Greek presence, such as Egypt or Syria, places
whose histories of intellectual syncretism would have surprised no one by
giving birth to a new religion. Instead Islam came out of a more backward
part of the region, and its appeal was certainly not philosophical or
intellectual or spiritual, for it had nothing new to offer in any of these
departments.

The contents of the Koran and the Hadiths are for the
most part wholly unoriginal, a clumsy melding of regional myths and
customs, with bits of Judaism and Christianity mortared into the whole
mess to give it some sense of history and order. Islam's obsessive focus
on Mohammed above all else, betrays the bankruptcy of a religion that had
no other prophets that they hadn't "borrowed" from pre-existing faiths,
and after rolling them in, proclaimed that Mohammed was the absolutely
last prophet, and no others need apply on pain of being beheaded. But none
of that is the point, because Islam's purpose was not religious, it was
social. Islam may have had nothing new to offer religiously, but it had
something very important to offer socially, unity. And that one compelling
idea dominates Muslim thinking to this day, and exemplifies Islam's appeal
to the Muslim world.

The Mecca and Medina both of Mohammed's day
and of the present day, was a world dominated by tribal clans and
families. There was no larger principle besides working for the benefit of
your own family. No trust was possible even between neighbors except
premised on the threat of retaliation from one's own kin. To advance
required family backing. The clan was everything. The individual was
nothing. Justice was meaningless. Law was a means of settling disputes
between families in order to avoid vendettas and
conflict.

Mohammed's Islam by contrast promised a supreme unity
above tribe and clan. The unity of the true believers. This of course is a
universally common promise made by cult leaders, and has a timeless appeal
to the disenchanted looking for a higher principle and a new identity. So
Mohammed was certainly not the first or last "prophet" promising a new
order for the believers in which the old social order would become
meaningless, and they would be the ones to end up on top regardless of
rank or birth. That has always been actually a major recruiting tool,
particularly for apocalyptic cults. But Mohammed's version had the largest
wingspread, as a billion Muslims today still wait for the entire world to
be transformed into a "perfectly just: Islamic society under Islamic law.

What Mohammed offered with Islam was a new identity for Arabs, as
Muslims. As tribes and clans they would always be divided and quarrelsome,
but as Muslims they were supposed to form into a perfect unity through
their submission to Allah, by way of old Mo himself. And while the power
of that appeal may often be lost on Westerners, one only need look at the
average present day Arab nation, whose governments are familial, where the
bureaucracy and military hierarchies are composed of the sons of families
who have relationships with the families who run the entire
system.

Beneath modern sounding titles such as President or Prime
Minister, the old tribe and clan relations still dominate the region. To
rule one must have their support. To get their support, one must trade
favors. And so under the aping of Western manners, titles, military
uniforms and office buildings-- the Middle East of today is not so
different from that of Mohammed's time. Except the Christians and Jews are
mostly gone. In their place is country after country full of Muslims,
which are ruled by governments that are as nepotistic, corrupt and
dysfunctional as you would expect from people who have no higher loyalty
than to the clan.

And to that region, the Islamists come again with Mohammed's
old message, that they can overturn all that corruption and replace it
with a higher identity, that of Islam. The Islamists promise divine
justice through Islamic law, corruption-free government as run by true
believers and societies run by Islamic values that will no longer be
playthings of the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. And if you
happen to be living in an overcrowded Middle Eastern slum like Cairo, run
by a corrupt and brutal family and its associated lieutenants in a style
virtually indistinguishable from the Mob, the appeal is an undeniably
powerful one.

The Islamists of course can never deliver on their
perfect "Islamic society", because their own leadership is just as
corrupted as the rest of the Middle East. But by constantly holding out
that promise of a perfect society and the brotherhood of all Muslims--
they capitalize on the existing discontent much as Mohammed himself did.
And if they ever succeed in taking over, the same sort of thugs that
Mohammed himself employed and reward with the loot of his murdered
victims, will suppress dissent far more ruthlessly than the previous
authorities their "revolution" over threw-- as the Ayatollah's Iran and
the Taliban's Afghanistan has aptly shown.

This then represents the
problem with trying to apply democracy to the Muslim world. Democracy on
top of the clan system results only in representation for the clan
leaders, which is perhaps a step forward, but not that much of one. Since
the clan leader is already the system and the clan is the process,
democracy cannot displace him, just as democracy could not displace the
DMV or the post office. But it can and will elevate the Islamists, because
it is a useful tool for those propounding Muslim unity, who are naturally
the only point of unity in countries where there is no other unifying idea
except xenophobia and intolerance for the smallest divergences from the
norm.

While a few Arab and Muslim countries have experimented with
nationalism, theirs is a recent and thin innovation with no real history
behind it. The borders of much of the Muslim world are the product of
either European colonial mapmakers or, as in the case of Pakistan,
enforced separations. They may have flags and anthems, and their leaders
may dress in suits or military uniforms borrowed from Westerners, but
these are poor facades, and their own people know it. Nasser's Arab
Socialism and Baathism were poor copies of European ideas implemented by
professional elites and virtually meaningless to the ordinary Arab. They
did not bring unity, only more war. (Islamism will of course do the same,
something that the prolonged bout of Al Queda atrocities in Iraq and
Jordan have communicated to a small percentage of the region's
inhabitants.)

But among all this violence and injustice, Islam
continues to hold out the golden promise of a unified Ummah, on terms
espoused by a cult leader on the primitive terms of a millennium and a
half ago. Because it represents magical thinking, it will always remain
more appealing than real progress and reform. While progress and reform
take work, the magical solution of Sharia promises to make everything just
and right as soon as it is imposed. It is also why Muslims in the region
will continue to see democracy as a means for imposing Islam, rather than
as an end in and of itself. Because simply injecting democracy into a
region that lacks an understanding of a theory of government based on
popular representation, turns into a tool for imposing the magical
solution of Islam.

Turning to Western Muslims though, one might ask
why they embrace Islamism even more aggressively than they do in their own
home countries. But the answer is rather obvious. The multicultural
societies they are asked to be part of are even more fractured and divided
than at home, but without the relative structure of tribe and clan.
Studies have shown that in multicultural societies there is less trust
between neighbors, which is an inevitable outcome of weakening the natural
human bases for connections within a neighborhood or community. Islamism
is even more in demand in such a fractured system because it promises
absolute unity, where now there is only a multitude of
divisions.

The idea of Islam co-existing with a diversity of
religions and beliefs is a bit of paradoxical stupidity. Islam was created
precisely to supplant a diversity of religions and beliefs by people who
wanted to find unity through one supreme system. The rise of Islamism in
the West cannot be negated by multiculturalism-- ITS POPULARITY IS A
REACTION TO MULTICULTURALISM. The Muslim who finds himself having to deal
with Christians, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus on a daily basis, who has to
navigate a complex and often contradictory system of social rules and
codes naturally longs for stability and simplicity, and he finds it in the
most radical interpretations of Islam.

The Islamists have a simple set of rules for how Muslims and
non-Muslims must behave, for how women must act and how men should act.
The Muslim professional in the West who must deal with clashing and
contrasting obligations, who must try to understand what it is to be a
Doctor and a Briton, who must choose between political parties and
interact with people whose ideas repel him in a professional context will
inevitably be drawn to Islam as the solution and the unifying principle in
all these conflicts. This great diverse society so beloved by the left is
exactly what drives him to the mosque and to the bomb, in the name of
simplifying all this mad cacophony until all the damned infidels bow their
heads to the infinite justice and wisdom of Islam.

The final
benefit of Islam of course is that it makes the Muslim in the West
immediately superior to the Westerners. The Muslim Doctor is not only
immediately better than his Western colleagues for being a Muslim, but
even the lowest doletaker is better than all the infidels. And better than
his Muslim brothers who have compromised their religion by becoming too
British. He finds a new solidarity and self-esteem by plotting to
overthrow and conquer this nation of infidels. And meanwhile back in Saudi
Arabia or Iran, the same chaotic cluster of families and clans finances
the Islamists, in order to keep their dangerous ideas away from their own
throats while using them as a weapon against the West, watch and
laugh.