After Mumbai

The big question about “islamic extremism” is whether to consider it a global mass movement of militant conquest or whether to think of it as a Ghost Shirt movement.

We’ve seen a number of global mass movements over the past century or so: commmunism, socialism, fascism. There were certainly moments when it looked like those movements, at once modern and reactionary, looked like they might take over the world. Does islamic terrorism fit into that template?

Or is it like the late 19th century Ghost Shirt movement, the last desperate convulsion of the Plains Indians to halt the annihilation of their culture by the western European capitalist democratic moloch? Or another late 19th century eruption, the Boxers, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, young Han Chinese trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch?

My guess, even after the bloodbath of Mumbai last week, is that the Islamic terrorists are more properly understood as violent young rich kids, young men desperately trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch into the islamic heartland.

There’s an argument to be made that Islam might one day take over Europe, and it is made well by Mark Steyn in America Alone. But could they take over the Hindu heartlands of India. I’ll bet that if you ask a Hindu he will say: Over my dead body. He’ll say: We didn’t spend a century of effort getting the Brits out of India and taking India back from the muslim Mughals in order to give it away to a bunch of Pakistani Kashmiri killers.

Or China. Ask a Han Chinese, and I’ll bet he’ll say that after the humiliation of the last two hundred years in which China, the Middle Kingdom, was humiliated by the west, invaded by the Japanese, and nearly wrecked by Mao ZeDong twice, China is not going to allow a bunch of muslim rich kids to stop the return of China to its rightful place at the head of the world’s nations.

And here is another reason, if you have the stomach for it. One of the central facts of the modern era is the emergence of women into the public square. Christianity is the woman’s religion par excellence. For instance, two-thirds of adherents in the Pentecostal movement are women. In the next few years you are going to see the Chinese house church movement going public. And we may even see Christianity making big inroads into the Dalits in India.

So I make the strategic judgment that the future does not belong to Islam.

It certainly doesn’t have a hope if we make a sensible transition to a nuclear-powered future and back out a lot of fossil fuel consumption with nuclear emergy production. If that happens there won’t be too much Saudi wealth available to fund the terrorists any more.

But then we’ll find something else to worry about.