Boreal

FAREWELL POSTINGS

How the West Can Save Itself

After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics – to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect the rest of the world – the Islamic world in particular – will follow.

We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile exception.

Mark Lilla, professor of the humanities at Columbia University, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West (2007)

 The twenty-first century belongs to Islam.

Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One, HarperOne, 2010

The twenty-first, and many centuries to come, as civilizations—if you can call them that—based on religious dogma can be quite resilient because of their ruthlessness in dealing with dissent.

The first civilization to be annihilated by the believers was that of the Arabs, and it’s been one after the other ever since, e.g. Persia. The Indian civilization survived, a much reduced entity, because there were simply too many that needed killing for refusing to submit to the Will of Allah, i.e., become Muslims; although the believers did give it a good try.

Based on Muslim chronicles of the period, and the demographic calculations done by historian K.S. Lal in his book Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, the largest known slaughter of an ethic group occurred during the Muslim conquest of large parts of the Indian subcontinent, e.g., modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Dr. Lal estimates that between 1000 CE and 1500 CE the population of Hindus decreased by 80 million; meaning that for much of that period the death rate among Hindus exceeded their birthrate.

If the eminent historian’s estimates are even remotely accurate, this period would have witnessed the largest cold-blooded killing of an indigenous people in all written history. The immensity of the slaughter is even more impressive when you consider the most common weapon used to carry it out: a sword.

The Arabs realised that their civilization was at risk with Mecca’s surrender and mounted a resolute counteroffensive (see Chapter “Battle of Hunayn,” Jihad in the Koran, Boreal Books) but were unable to dislodge a now entrenched enemy and accepted the inevitable.

The death of us as individuals is inevitable as it seems is the death of civilizations. It does not have to be that way. The future does not have to be Islamic. Daoud offered the beginning of a strategy, that of persuading believers already here to accept Western values. That could prove to be an insurmountable task if we don’t limit the influx of “souls that need to be persuaded to change.”

The Cleansing of Mecca and Avoiding a Similar Fate