Islam's Violence is Rooted in Instability
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Islamic violence is nearly impossible to deny. But
why is Islam violent? The usual answer is to point
to Koranic verses calling for the conquest and
subjugation of non-Muslims. That certainly covers
the theological basis for Islamic violence. But it
fails to explain why Muslims continue to practice
it. Even against each other. Violence has become the
defining form of Islamic exceptionalism.
Optimists
speak of reforming Islam. But such reforms had over
a thousand years in which to take place.
Islam is an ideology. Its violence is a strategy.
That strategy fit the needs of Mohammed. Mohammed
chose to use force to spread his ideology. He needed
to recruit fighters so he preached the inferiority
of non-Muslims, the obligation for Muslims to
conquer non-Muslims and the right of his fighters to
seize the property and wives of non-Muslims as
incentive for them to join his fight. Furthermore he
even promised them that if they should fall in
battle, they would receive loot and women in
paradise.
The strategy was barbarous, but quite effective.
Mohammed had created a new super-tribe in a tribal
society. The tribe of Islam united different groups
in a mission of conquest. The Islamic religion
allowed the varying clans to be more effective and
ambitious than their victims. Within a surprisingly
short amount of time the chain of conquests made
Islam into a world religion. The most effective
Islamic conquerors could not only claim vast
territories, carving up civilization into fiefdoms,
but they could prepare their sons and grandsons to
continue the chain of conquests.
Islam made the standard tactics of tribal warfare
far more effective. Its alliance was harder to
fragment and its fighters were not afraid of death.
But at the same time Islam remained fundamentally
tribal. It made tribal banditry more effective, but
didn’t change the civilization. It codified the
tribal suspicion of outsiders and women into a
religious doctrine. That still drives Islamic
violence against non-Muslims and women today.
And yet Islam could have reformed. All it had to do
was choose a different civilizational strategy.
The current clash of civilizations is between
cooperative societies and hierarchal tribal
societies. Western countries are cooperative
societies. They succeed by bringing together a
variety of peoples into cooperative organizations.
These organizations negotiate and exchange
everything from goods to mutual defense. Primitive
versions of such organizations existed in Mohammed’s
time. They have also existed within Islamic
societies, but they have been inhibited by the
tribal instability of Islamic civilizations.
Cooperative societies emphasize internal conscience
over external posturing. Religion is a matter of
personal morality, rather than collective conquest.
Economic resources are developed by harnessing new
ideas and techniques to provide wider benefits to
the society.
Islamic tribal societies are governed by extended
family groups and other hierarchies that, like
Islam, serve a similar role. While such societies
can be locally stable, albeit backward, expanding
them is difficult because their only point of unity
comes through conflict with outsiders. Without
external conflicts with non-Muslims, tribal
societies degenerate into internal tribal conflicts.
That is what happened in Iraq and Syria, not to
mention Yemen and Libya. Most Muslim countries are
delicately balanced on the edge of a precipice and
they can be very easily tipped into horrifying
violence between different groups if their fragile
internal order breaks down and there are no outside
enemies.
The Muslim expansion became unsustainable once the
external spread of conquest limited the access of
Muslim armies to non-Muslim victims. Islamic unity
did not survive Mohammed for very long. Stability
came through feudal societies which were slow,
backward and unwieldy, but prevented conflict.
Ultimately the only stable Muslim society is a slave
state. Modern dictatorships, which strive to imitate
modern countries by building up professional elites
of doctors, engineers, lawyers and generals, are
eventually undone by them. It’s the genuinely
backward kingdoms that rely on oil wealth and slave
labor which best weathered the changes of the past
generations and maintained their ruling privileges.
And here we come to the fundamental crisis of
Islamic violence.
Islamic civilization is fundamentally unstable and
unsustainable. Contact with the modern world
destabilized it setting off a series of chain
reactions. Islamic civilization, particularly in the
Middle East, could not make the transition to
modernity. Those countries that had oil could buy
their way out of the problem with generous subsidies
at home while purchasing influence abroad. The
Saudis made their own people rich while controlling
the West. They financed wars without needing
generals by funding terrorists. They kept a tribal
society going by hiring foreign professionals to do
most of the technical work.
Most Muslim countries however couldn’t buy that type
of immunity from modernity. And even the Saudis had
only bought a temporary immunity that is running
down along with oil prices. The most Islamic
societies had followed the old Mohammedan practice
of exhausting the land. But where were they going to
move on to?
The mass migration to Europe is part of the answer.
While Europeans are shocked at the sight of millions
of people just picking up and walking away, the
Middle East still has deep nomadic roots. Most
Muslim countries are political and historical
fictions. Family groups matter far more than
national identities.
Outside Israel, agriculture in the Middle East is
sparse. The strong attachment to the land that is
found among Israelis or Europeans is absent.
Feudalism associates working the land with
inferiority and feudalism is a more recent memory
among Muslims than among most Europeans. Success
means expanding into someone else’s land and living
off the spoils rather than staying and working your
own.
Western cooperative societies eagerly welcome Muslim
migrants because they expect them to cooperate and
contribute. But that is not happening. Muslim
societies are hierarchal, not cooperative. The new
arrivals expect to fit into a hierarchy. If they
don’t encounter a strict hierarchy, they seek to
“conquer” by establishing their hierarchy with the
supremacism of the Koran as their guide.
Western societies seek to settle permanently. They
plan for the long term. Nomadic tribals burn through
resources, viewing cities and institutions as assets
to strip, raid and dispose of, before moving on. The
Islamic migration is not a new phenomenon and Europe
is not meant to be its stopping point.
This is a variation of Mohammed’s old strategy.
While some Islamic groups, such as ISIS and Al
Qaeda, stay behind to battle for the dying lands of
the Middle East to establish their own perfect
society, large numbers of Muslims are choosing to
move on to fresher pastures. This cycle will only
repeat itself.
This strategy is why Islam continues to be violent.
It’s why exporting democracy is useless.
Democracy works in cooperative societies. It can
only work within tribal societies as a democracy of
groups. And it requires that these groups prefer
cooperation to conflict as a civilizational
strategy.
Islam favors conflict over cooperation. In the
absence of outside enemies, its doctrine allows its
quarreling groups to name each other as infidels,
heretics and enemies. To reform Islam, Muslims would
have to make the civilizational transition to a
cooperative strategy. They would have to
fundamentally change their values, their priorities
and how their societies function.
And there is no sign of that happening.
Islamic civilization becomes unstable once it
expands beyond its tribal limits. Its only coping
strategy for that instability is violence, whether
directed externally at non-Muslims or internally at
other Muslims. Its economic development tools are
limited and make supporting a modern society very
difficult because they emphasize maintaining
internal hierarchal stability over innovation and
progress.
Islam is violent because it’s unstable. Its only
tool is violence. Its societies exhaust their
limited resources and then invade their neighbors.
They repeat the same strategy until they are
stopped. Then the exhausted Islamic civilization
becomes a staid slave society that is stable, but
backward. If that society is disturbed, then the egg
cracks and the whole horrible process of war,
invasion and exhaustion begins again. That is what
we are experiencing right now. And there is no easy
answer to this problem.
We can inhibit the expansion of Islamic migration.
Or it will wash over our societies and destroy them