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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28674 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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It really does seem like we’re seeing propaganda at work here.

Sam Harris (who lost his mind in 2016) calling Islam a death cult is the forever correct thing.

Until a time that religion is as neutered as present day American Christianity, they should hold no place at the civilization table.

Islam was kind of ok when appropriated by syncretists who appreciated the latitude offered by simply being Not The Dominant. Mutazilites, Sufiism, Ahmadism, Hui Islam.

This of course all went to shit when the Saudis leveraged their stewardship of Mecca and the Aramco money to turbocharge Wahabism. Maintaining local control by exploiting Islam is one thing, actively exporting it is another. Salafi dominance was only checked by matching ultraconservative evolutions in Hanafi and even Shafi subschools like Deobandism or Dawah. Its an arms race for Who Is The Best Muslim and governments that profited from islamism as a wedge issue now are struggling to tame the beast. Every country that tried to distract from internal failings by promoting religious revivalism always falls prey to even more extreme versions of the religion, and that becomes an impossible trap to escape. Failing regimes are propped up by external aid because the donors suffer more if the regime collapses, not because of the worthiness of the regime. Pakistan getting 40bn of World Bank loans is because its implosion will massively destabilize Western Europe through refugees and nuclear proliferation, not because a milirary dictatorship surviving off Islamist revivalism is a stable polity worth investing in.

This of course all went to shit when the Saudis leveraged their stewardship of Mecca and the Aramco money to turbocharge Wahabism. Maintaining local control by exploiting Islam is one thing, actively exporting it is another.

This might simply be inevitable. Progressives have a seemingly totally secular ideology with no holy site but they also often coalesce around a certain set of specific totems and doctrines, even across borders.

The world is too connected now, we simply know too much about one another. Many localized forms of Islam - especially the offshoot religions generally considered heretical - will always be put under pressure by people attempting to make them orthodox because it's so much easier to notice and police now.

I come from a seemingly laid-back Muslim background but even we had the sense that there was such a thing as being more devout and strict and people who went that route were praised. The potential for being forcibly realigned with more conservative versions of Islam was always lurking.

You see similar things with claims that evangelicals essentially invented modern homophobia in African nations. Those countries have just as much access to the latest advances in liberal theory. It's their own judgment that the evangelicals better align with the faith that makes them more attractive, not their money or overwhelming control over the American cultural industry. The other side has that. But it can't change that they feel one case is just stronger

I think Michael C. Cook puts it well in Ancient Religions, Modern Politics (albeit using an extreme example):

My approach likewise diverges from the view that there is no such thing as Islam, just many local Islams. This view is perfectly coherent in principle, and some fragments of reality do indeed help us to imagine what it would be like to live in a world in which it was true. A plausible example of the ever-increasing religious entropy that would characterize such a world may be found among the Muslim Chams of Indo-China, particularly those of Annam, as described by French observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their pantheon overlapped with that of their neighbors, the Hindu Chams, and included a mother goddess. They had a manuscript of the Bible that told of the creation of the sun god and moon goddess,8 and a central role in one of their rituals was played by a priestess.

This is not to say that they had lost touch with other forms of Islam altogether. They still knew about Allāh; indeed such was their respect for him that they abstained from sex on Mondays, the day of his birth.10 They still recited texts that bore some relationship to the Koran, and while the laity observed only a three-day Ramaḍān, the priests fasted for the full month.

Yet it does not take a card-carrying Wahhābī to feel an element of shock at this picture. We have here an example of a religion that has drifted so far from its origins as to be within sight of exemplifying a teasing idea developed by a philosopher of intellectual history: a tradition that has gradually changed over time to the point that no single element present at the start is still there at the end.

But to think of the Muslim world as nothing but a mosaic of religious traditions like that of the Chams would be very misleading. In the world in which we actually live, such unchecked drift is unlikely to continue indefinitely. A few centuries ago Islam was undoubtedly more polylithic than it is today, but it has never been a heap of rubble -- the centrifugal forces of time and distance are countered by the pull of homogenization.14 Such homogenizing forces were already at work in pre-modern times; more metropolitan forms of Islam have always had the potential to trump local differentiation. Modern conditions have rendered the effect even stronger. The Chams are again a case in point: a French source of 1891 mentions that some years previously three Muslim villages had abruptly abandoned the worship of their Cham gods; this was after a foreign Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca was passing through and condemned such practices.The pilgrim from Mecca had clearly put the Chams on the spot. But in a world in which there really was no such thing as Islam, just many local Islams, there would have been no spot for him to put them on.

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