After Mumbai

THE BIG question about “islamic extremism” is whether to consider it a global mass movement of militant conquest or whether to think of it as a Ghost Shirt movement.

We’ve seen a number of global mass movements over the past century or so: commmunism, socialism, fascism. There were certainly moments when it looked like those movements, at once modern and reactionary, looked like they might take over the world. Does islamic terrorism fit into that template?

Or is it like the late 19th century Ghost Shirt movement, the last desperate convulsion of the Plains Indians to halt the annihilation of their culture by the western European capitalist democratic moloch? Or another late 19th century eruption, the Boxers, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, young Han Chinese trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch?

My guess, even after the bloodbath of Mumbai last week, is that the Islamic terrorists are more properly understood as violent young rich kids, young men desperately trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch into the islamic heartland.

There’s an argument to be made that Islam might one day take over Europe, and it is made well by Mark Steyn in America Alone. But could they take over the Hindu heartlands of India. I’ll bet that if you ask a Hindu he will say: Over my dead body. He’ll say: We didn’t spend a century of effort getting the Brits out of India and taking India back from the muslim Mughals in order to give it away to a bunch of Pakistani Kashmiri killers.

Or China. Ask a Han Chinese, and I’ll bet he’ll say that after the humiliation of the last two hundred years in which China, the Middle Kingdom, was humiliated by the west, invaded by the Japanese, and nearly wrecked by Mao ZeDong twice, China is not going to allow a bunch of muslim rich kids to stop the return of China to its rightful place at the head of the world’s nations.

And here is another reason, if you have the stomach for it. One of the central facts of the modern era is the emergence of women into the public square. Christianity is the woman’s religion par excellence. For instance, two-thirds of adherents in the Pentecostal movement are women. In the next few years you are going to see the Chinese house church movement going public. And we may even see Christianity making big inroads into the Dalits in India.

So I make the strategic judgment that the future does not belong to Islam.

It certainly doesn’t have a hope if we make a sensible transition to a nuclear-powered future and back out a lot of fossil fuel consumption with nuclear emergy production. If that happens there won’t be too much Saudi wealth available to fund the terrorists any more.

But then we’ll find something else to worry about.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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