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What is the future of Islam in the West and the future of the West with Islam?
Popular youth figures Andrew Tate and Sneako became Muslims and made it a part of their media personality, which frequently gets millions of unique views with the audience mostly impressionable young boys.
Muslim memes are becoming popular online. Muslim terminology is becoming popular online — I have seen cases of Muslim expressions like inshallah and mashallah entering terminally online lexicon (which is the first step to normie lexicon).
Unlike Christianity, there is a confluence of significant factors that lead to Islam retaining strict behavioral and cultural rules. Mosques and scholars are funded by wealthy Arabs who have a monetary, political, and genetic influence in the spread of the religion; imams have children, the more strict the imam the more children, and dynastic imam families are not uncommon; the center of the religion is the Middle East where there is a constant threat of violence if leaders stray far enough from orthodoxy; the practice of excluding women from decision-making means that feminine-coded tolerance is sidelined; the religion itself highly emphasizes the following of strict tradition and punishments for “innovation”.
We are seeing the influence of Muslims in the criticisms against Israel, in a London street draped with Ramadan signs on Easter, and so on.
It’s interesting that “Islam is a threat” discourse has died down relative to a decade ago, despite the influence of the religion increasing. Is it because so many people have lost faith in both liberalism and liberal Christianity that they no longer care? I think that could play a part. Is it just laziness? Has there been a fundamental shift in assessment of Muslims?
Speaking only for myself: yes. I'll take the Taliban over the current batch of western elites.
Interesting you say that, because I as an actual practicing muslim (and coethnic) would far rather have the current batch of western elites over the literal Taliban ruling the place.
Sharia law really isn't something you want in the modern world. The prohibitions on interest alone would destroy the economy far worse than what current elites are doing by not listening to economists/giving in to populists.
I think that if sharia were to come anyways it wouldn’t be accompanied by non-collapse in any case, I’m sure that the other person who wants shariah over the current ruling of Western elites would also be fine with a collapse in order to destroy the currently crafted elite-order; you wouldn’t want to defeat the elites and then swap out them with another set of elites with beards while keeping everything else in place.
Most interestingly the first actual imposition of shariah on the world from the 7th century onward was seen by Christians and Jews as an instance of collapse for the greater good: God was punishing them for their decadence and heresies. The Jews thought that God was rewarding them and relinquishing their punishment from under the Christians, only for the Muslims to subsequently punish the Jews again and prevent the one thing they really wanted (building the third temple) by building the dome of the rock. The Christians thought this was variably punishment for having so many schisms or having icons or whatever. In any case everyone was basically expecting the world to end in the 7th century anyways (in fact even the Muslims did, they thought that Jesus was going to come back after they took Jerusalem), and the Muhammadan caliphate was just another extension of this apocalyptic hope. Everyone was yearning for ultimate collapse, which didn’t actually happen, only regional collapse did.
We might be seeing this yearning for ultimate collapse once again come about, hence why everyone (e.g Catgirl Kulak) seems to be saying that ‘in a couple of decades the entire economy will collapse!’ at best or ‘everyone on earth will fall dead in the same second’ at worst (e.g AI doomers). The hope for shariah is probably just another element of that Western death-drive.
All great civilisations have a death drive. Consider the fin de siècle or Edwardian obsession with the occult, or the proliferation of millenarian new age movements at the height of postwar American dominance.
Or more specifically, all great civilizations have a drive for the end of history, which would inevitably lead to the death of change and the resurrection of a perennial age from the ashes (which means that everything has to burn down first). A typical Marxist would say that the American and French revolutions were extensions of this in terms of being ‘revolutions of the bourgeoisie’, which ironically wasn’t the ending of history, but the starting of an entirely new era (the one of the subjugation of the proletariat in capitalism), but every new cycle thinks it’s the last.
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What can I say? All things considered they're a bit strict for my taste, but they do what they say on the tin, which I tend to consider strictly superior to the vague and fluent rules of the west. The way of life they want to impose might not quite be my of tea either, but I recognize it as humane, while the western seems to aim for abolishing humanity.
They do what they say on the tin, meaning rule over an unproductive peasant economy that is one of the poorest nations in the world? No, it is clear modernity is still better than the Taliban if the goal of organized human society is some kind of technological or industrial advancement.
And the Taliban haven’t even been able to stop ISIS terror attacks, which continue regularly under their authority. The first duty of any state is to order; the Taliban cannot even accomplish this. You may wish to be ruled over by illiterate, destructive tribesmen descended from Buddhists converted by Arab conquerors in the distant past. That opinion may not be widely shared in the West, though.
I don't know how much clearer I can make it that they're not my first choice, but if western elites expect me to fight for them in any conflict with radical Muslims, they're in for a surprise. If they don't like that, maybe they shouldn't have imported so many of them back when people like me were saying it might not be a great idea.
Isn't that cutting your own nose off to spite your face? Your opponents finally come around to your position, to the extent they are now willing to violently oppose the Islamic people/world you also dislike and wanted to keep out, which was one of the key disputes you had with them...
And you switch sides to side with the people you were against in the first place?
Why would you expect to be taken seriously? I hate that you won't go along with my position so much, that I would side with the people that we had opposing views on? That seems like simple spite. At which point despite being correct you can't be taken seriously in any kind of political coalition. If you don't get your own way, you side with the people you were against?
Setting aside any moral issues, pragmatically there is no reason for your opponents to ever consider your ideas. If you hate them when they disagree, and hate them when they agree, then you aren't leaving much space for change, even when you are actually right.
For one, they haven't actually come around, they're still importing them wholesale.
Right back at you. I don't believe the only reason we have all this promotion of "diversity" is to foment conflict in society. The fact that the progressive elites are siding with the Muslims (for example) right up until the point I decide I won't fight them in progressives' name, is proof positive I was being taken for a ride. It's your fight now, have fun.
Sure, if they don't change their mind then that makes sense. But this is predicated on them doing so.
That said I understand now I think. I'd suggest the elites wouldn't be changing their minds BECAUSE you decided you won't fight the Muslims. In fact, given I have worked with what might be called the elite in the UK, I can almost guarantee they aren't thinking about you (and your peers) at all, or that they are trying to take you for a ride at all, because they don't think about people like you or me much at all. (Which to be clear is a big problem, hence why I quit politics, its just not the same problem you think there is).
As for me, I don't think it will come to a fight at all. At least due to internal Muslims. I have extensive experience with Pakistani communities in the UK and they are being "corrupted" by western secular values quite substantially.
To be clear Islam is in my opinion a terrible religion and globally a much bigger problem than Christianity. But I expect it to lose power as its main countries advance and modernize. Reducing birth rates even in Islamic countries show it is not immune. To me the West is clearly the strong horse here. You can bribe native Pakistani and Afghani muslims with Man Utd strips. We've won so hard a tiny Westernised nation can essentially hold off the whole of the Middle East on its own.
Islam is dying. Just as Christianity is. Sunnis and Shi'ites in fight, Pakistan has problems with the Taliban. They are not united.
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Only someone who has never experienced the direct influence of the Taliban would think that way. The Taliban are like fire, they make good servants but bad masters (in the sense that they keep the overton window open for moderate Islam by taking all the attacks which would have come upon moderate Islam otherwise). Putting them incharge of other human beings or in general handing them any power at all ends badly (see how they commit terror attacks when handed power etc., they're even planning on bringing back stoning for adultery!). They work best as zoo specimens, not wild animals.
I remember talking to someone from Pakistan about life in a part of that country where the Taliban were active. He was threatened by armed men on the train because of a little Western apparel. He also once saw a dead man in the street, but just ran away, in order to not instigate a feud between the dead man's family and his own. Presumably the dead man stayed on the street and fed the flies, until someone from his family found his rotting corpse.
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You haven't really said much about what bothers you about their way of life, and the way you talk about them seems more like a point in their favor than anything else.
I admit to not keeping up with Afghanistan, I mostly associated terror attacks with ISIS than the Taliban...
What are you waiting for? The Taliban state has been founded. Move to Afghanistan today, while you still see things clearly.
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I like the people close to me having basic freedoms like my wife not needing to wear a niqab. I like being able to argue using reason and being able to counter "The good book says X, therefore you are wrong when you claim not X" without being denounced as a heretic. I like being clean shaven (yes, the Taliban imposed a beard requirement on all men the last time they were in power), I enjoy dancing and music etc. etc.
I can go on and on...
Oh boy, if you don't like me you really won't like the Taliban. When I say they are my coethnics I don't just mean they have the same skin colour as me/come from the same part of the world, I mean that I, like a very large portion of them, am Pashtun (complete with tribal affiliation and all that). The values they grew up with are the same as those my parents instilled in me as a child and from where I derive my belief system today, except that I've become extremely westernised (people call me a coconut back home - brown on the outside, white on the inside - and I can't really say they are wrong). I'm like the grown up version of Kamal's son from Kipling's Ballad of East and West after the British system has completely laundered him.
Think me but fundamentalist Muslim when you think of the Taliban and then reconsider whether you want someone like that to rule over you.
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