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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?
This all describes Christianity a couple centuries ago. How did that turn out?
Some of the listed elements describe Protestant Christianity, but certainly not (3) and (5), and I would argue not (1). Because Islam requires knowledge of Arabic and because the required pilgrimage is Mecca, the growth of Islam aids the growth of Arabs in a way that doesn’t apply to Protestant missionaries. The center of Protestant Christianity was never an area plagued by religious terrorism, although it has a history of political terrorism, because the center has been a singular church or a collection of hands-off church collectives. Protestant Christianity is a faith-based religion that promotes orthodoxy about perhaps one dozen facets of faith, whereas Islam is mainly orthopraxic with most of a person’s focus being the correct prayer routine at correct hours in correct language, fasting at correct times, etc, although it also possesses amuch stricter orthodoxy as well. Islam has significantly less leeway about interpreting rules than Christianity because it eschews parables and exaggerations. It is legalistic.
There are plainly substantial reasons why what happened to Christianity may not happen to Islam. And let’s not forget the racial angle: Islam began as an Arab supremacist religion; artifacts of that still exist today. For Arabs in America, their religion is the whole celebration of their racial achievement, which does not apply to Christian Protestants.
It empirically isn't doing much for the growth of the Arab population right now. Most Muslims are not Arabs.
Northwestern Europe was ravage by religious warfare for hundreds of years. A lot of people died over this. At that time, "political" and "religious" was not a very firm distinction.
De jure yes, but de facto Protestantism was extremely orthorpraxic. Calvinists insist that good works do not purchase salvation but are instead a product of salvation, but in practice this is a purely semantic distinction. There's a reason 'puritanical' is shorthand for 'rigid scrupulosity.'
It's already happening. Even Saudi Arabia, the financial powerhouse behind the spread of Wahabbism, is liberalizing rapidly. The Iranian mullahs can't even keep their country from periodically exploding into anti-regime protests. MENA fertility rates have more than halved in the past half-century.
Most Muslims are not Arab, and also empirically the Arab population grows. The population of the Arab world grows at the same time that they export Arabs overseas and despite its increasing development which is significant.
Religious warfare which involved political claims occurred. That’s like the Shia vs Sunni proxy war in Syria and Iraq, which is as political as it is religious. But there was nothing like your typical Muslim “because your congregation is liberalizing I will commit an attack” ideology. That’s novel to Islam. Protestants didn’t blow up a building when someone started teaching girls how to read.
I don’t think you understand how orthopraxic Islam is. Calvinists don’t define hierarchies of good works versus bad works with their commensurate rewards in heaven. Calvinists don’t cling to authoritative transmissions of Jesus which make mandatory thousands of small actions and make commendable certain other actions. As an example, in Islam they legislate the direction of your pointer finger in prayer, every syllable of the Quranic reading, the upkeep of your beard. You are comparing apples to orangutans. In Calvinism, the question is “do you believe and do you behave morally according to my view”. In Islam, it’s “do you believe according to this long list and do you do these long lists of actions.” The five obligatory prayers where every syllable and movement must be precise is an example of this sort of legalism. The Muslims who do not follow legalism are called Quranists and they are not even a percent of global Islam. There’s no Muslim sola scriptura movement of note, which secularization used to desacralize.
More and more slowly, as they become more prosperous, like other ethnic groups:
https://www.prb.org/resources/fertility-declining-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/806110/fertility-rate-in-the-arab-world/
Primarily, Arab birth rates are high because most Arabs are still poor. They are about half that of the DRC, where most people are even poorer than most Arabs.
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