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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Islam is much stronger but much more brittle than Judaism.

I've discussed how certain theological claims of Islam are more brittle than its Abrahamic brothers before but I think you're not accounting for inertia and adaptation and the fact that these religions have absorbed enough from Judaism to follow the same path.

Judaism adapted because it had to, it once also had the problem of not being able to handle earthly failure. David's kingdom did not in fact last forever, despite the unconditional covenant. The Deuteronomist message of obeying to avoid punishment via curse and political cataclysm didn't really work out: given where the Jews were geographically, they got rolled over despite trying to be faithful anyway and we got apocalypticism instead.

Islam hasn't had to adapt, despite having a rough time in modernity, because it's had the demographic weight as a cushion against total calamity.

Here's the thing: a lot of these adaptations are already within the Qur'an. The Qur'an is inherited apocalypticism but paired it with a more high agency response in jihad (George Bush's invasion of Iraq led to a rise in apocalyptic feeling), it already has a detached corpus and distributed system of religious common law, and already has pragmatic adaptations to the inability to fulfill divine commands. It maintains the locale-weakness but Judaism shed this without dying.

Christianity is evidence that disconfirming events are no obstacle to human stubbornness. Too many people believe in Islam to stop, there's no reason to think it will not be amenable to the same cognitive dissonance management strategies the Jews and other apocalyptic cults were, especially given how much it draws from the former.

Especially if you just mega-super-duper-jihaded them. The Kabba didn't fall into a sinkhole, Mohammed's tomb wasn't hit by an asteroid. A kaffir President in the Dar-al-Harb (this is a concept a lot of Muslims don't think about but, trust me, it'll be relevant again) simply brought the war to Islam. It's not a refutation, it's a validation. That's what kaffir are supposed to do. It's the sort of attack that unites people. Plenty of Muslims were disgusted by 9/11 (what you see now from many younger Muslims in the West is a response to the idea that their elders apologized for a decade for something that had nothing to do with them, to no end), every Muslim will be aligned against the US if it robs all of them of the Hajj.

As for the lack of the Hajj: Islam would lose something in terms of being able to get everyone back on the same page yearly but modern telecomms allows that anyway. The Arabic tenor of the faith won't end because it's tied to the Qur'an itself which is portable and beyond questioning for Muslims (it's not really a problem, ime all of the criticisms of Western language dominance and so on apply mainly to Westerners and it doesn't even occur to Muslims to apply to Arabs). Why on Earth would it break the faith rather than lead to scholars simply accepting that a commandment that cannot reasonably be fulfilled doesn't count against someone? Hell, you can end up in an even worse situation: without Hajj some might suggest other ways of accruing religious status (jihad) count for more.