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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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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?

Is it because so many people have lost faith in both liberalism and liberal Christianity that they no longer care.

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.

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.