Islamofascism vs. Christian Fundamentalism: Which is the Greater Threat?

by Salamantis

I view the contemporary Islamofascist memeset as currently more globally dangerous to freedom and tolerance than the Fundamentalist Christian one, for a number of reasons.

1) Recent History

The lion's share of mass-killing terror attacks in the past quarter-century have been perpetrated by these people, and not Fundamentalist Christians (although they, too, are on my "Danger, Will Robinson!" list). 9/11, London, Beslan, Bali, Madrid, the USS Cole, the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies, the Khobar Towers...the list could go on and on.

2) Fundamentalist Literalism

Christians believe that the Bible was written by human beings, under Holy inspiration, while the official position of Islam is that the Qu'ran (literally, the Recitation) was dictated to Muhammed, from Allah (God) by the Archangel Gabriel, and is word-for-word accurate and correct for all time. Thus, while there is a reasonable split between Fundamentalist Christians, who take the Bible literally, and the rest of Christians, who see parable, poetry, metaphor, simile, era-linked human prejudices, contradictions and inaccuracies in the Bible, no such split is officially possible within Islam. All observant Muslims are expected to submit to the literalist stance; in fact, Islam translates as Submission.

3) More Violent Character

While there are a half-dozen or so peace-and-tolerance passages contained within the Qu'ran, there are also more than a hundred vicious and violent passages to be found there. People say, well, the Old Testament is indeed itself to a significant degree a 'testament' to divinely sanctioned brutality, and this is true. However, most of that brutality was superseded by the pronouncements in the more peaceful and tolerant New Testament, while the Qu'ran is divided into the Meccan and the Medinan sections. The Meccan section, which came first, when Muhammed was militarily weak and was forced to placate his enemies, contains all of the peace-and-tolerance passages, while the Medinan section, which contains many (although not all) of the brutal and violent passages, was written later, and supercedes the more moderate Meccan section. It is as if, in the Bible, the Old Testament came later and superceded the New; if this were so, the majority of Christianity would most likely be much more brutal and intolerant than small sections of it (see the former Yugoslavia) are now.

In fact, there is no such thing as enduring peace with infidel nations in the Muslim lexicon; instead, they employ truces (hudnas). These are, according to the Qu'ran, supposed to be offered when the Faithful are militarily weak vis-à-vis their adversaries, to give them time to increase their military numbers and augment their armaments. When the weak faithful become militarily strong compared to their adversaries, the hudna is to be unilaterally broken by the faithful, and jihad is to resume. Once one understands the conceptual character of the hudna, it becomes obvious that it is never in a nation's interest to accept one.

4) The Examples of the Respective Primary Protagonists

Jesus only once became violent in the Bible, when he whipped the moneychangers. Mainly, he preached faith, love of one's neighbors, and nonviolence. When one of his disciples raised a sword against and cut the ear off of one of the people sent to arrest him, he supposedly put it back on. Muhammed, on the other hand, was historically a warrior and guerilla fighter. His life was circumscribed by military conquest. The hadiths, which are records of occurrences in and commentaries on the life of Muhammed and records of his words (when they were not supposed to be dictated by the Archangel Gabriel), are nearly as important as the Qu'ran itself to them.

5) The Confrontation with Modernity

Christianity began to behaviorally moderate and domesticate itself around 500 years ago, due to the effects that the Reformation and the Enlightenment had upon it. Islam has yet to go through this confrontation; it is only now just beginning for them. However, in the present era, with the advent of global anonymous communications and travel, and with easy access available to both the materials needed to construct WMD's and the knowledge needed to properly employ these materials, this is a particularly dangerous time for fanatics to lash out from the growing pains. Giordano Bruno conceived of relativity 350 years before Einstein and was burned as a heretic for it, and rockets (fireworks) were already known to Europe by then, due to Marco Polo's sojourn in China; think of what it would have been like if the medieval world had had the option of ballistic thermonuclear conflagration (not to mention genetically engineered plagues and mass-produce-able deadly chemical compounds). There is the added factor that one of the Muslim death-penalty heresies (or shirks) translates as 'innovation' (Islamists are quite willing to appropriate death-dealing technology while rejecting the science behind it - a Pakistani 'scientist' actually wrote a paper that advocated solving his country's energy problems by harnessing djinn (genie) power!); thus it can be dangerous for Muslims to publicly embrace novel concepts - and this will only make it more difficult for Muslim adaptation of include accommodation to other perspectives rather than to simply be comprised solely of the Borgian assimilation, subjugation or elimination of all of their vectors.

6) The Evolution of Universality and Intolerance in Totalizing Memeplexes

Mind viruses are unlike the viruses that plague our bodies. If a physically infectious disease kills its host too quickly, that host cannot serve as an infection vector (which is why AIDS is so much more of a global threat than the Ebola virus - the long, symptom-free yet contagious incubation period). This is also why deadly diseases demonstrate the historical propensity to become slower killers as time goes on. However, a different survival strategy presents itself for totalizing mind-viruses, which MUST be cognitively rather than physically communicated, and thus, if they are elaborate and/or involve significant behavioral changes, difficult to contract under the radar of one's attention: to kill and/or enslave all those who RECOGNIZE the attempted dissemination (proselytizing) and REFUSE to be infected (part of these memesets is invariably the inculcation of the desire and/or duty to infect others - this is how they propagate). This eliminates competition for cognitive residence from alternative memeplexes (the dead cannot communicate their competing vectors). Unlike physical diseases, where people may be infected with multiple differing phages simultaneously (like measles AND the flu), a totalizing memeplex must have SOLE possession of its niche, or it cannot be said to possess it at all. And in fact, to reject conversion to Islam is considered by Islamofascists to be an insult and attack upon it, punishable by death.

Now, remembering that the historical function of tribal religion has been to enhance group cooperation and cohesion, thus giving religious tribes an advantage in warfare against tribes with less mutual commitment and more individualism (and most likely the pre-historical function, too - thus setting up a group selection which would tend to reproductively favor those who were increasingly susceptible to infection by religious memeplexes), let's take a quick look at the evolution of universality and intolerance in Patriarchal Monotheism.

The memeplex of Judaism originally involved a divine gift of a particular parcel of land to a particular chosen people - Israel for the Jews (although, lately, converts to Judaism, although not sought, are accepted from every racial and ethnic classification). Thus the parameters for the growth of the Jewish memeplex were set by the nature of the memeplex itself - only within ethnic Jews, who were only promised dominion over historical Israel (most Zionists still think this way).

However, with the evolution of Christianity from Judaism, the ethnic imperative and the geographical rootedness were pruned off, and all one had to do was to accept the memeplex. This allowed Christianity to spread to all sorts of ethnicities, and for them to take control of previously non-Christian lands, as their demographics grew to majority within them. It also had the advantage of spreading the genetic sacrifice idea beyond a tribe, so that multiple tribes sharing the same memeplex could band together and both protect each other and cooperate in the confrontation of common enemies (a feature that the Roman Empire put to conscous use when they adopted Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire). However, Christianity was written so it could be disseminated via persuasion - the Great Charter, which comprises the Christian memeplex's infection module, reads: "Go ye therefore and TEACH all nations". Of course, the construction of this module implies the conviction that the vector is offering a gift of knowledge to the ignorant, and for this reason many have been historically forced to adopt Christianity 'for their own good', even when they were too (willfully or otherwise) ignorant to recognize what their own good was, and sometimes at the cost of their mortal bodies, if in the process their immortal souls were saved.

Still, the language of Christianity's proselytization module is persuasional rather than coercive, and this left room for the development of tolerance for other faiths, even while missionaries continue to be perpetually funded to 'spread the Good Word'.

This is a weakness that the evolution into Islam has exploited. The Muslim memeplex explicitly substitutes coercion for persuasion. It is quite precise in what may and may not be done: all 'People of the Book' - that is, Jews and Christians (and I suppose Zoroastrians - they have a single holy book called the Zend Avestra of Zarathustra)- have the option to a) convert to Islam, b) be put to death, or c) live in Dhimmitude, a serfic, subservient state somewhere between slavery and second-class citizenship, characterized by less civil rights, the fact that any Muslim's word will always be legally favored over theirs in courts of Shari'a law, and the payment of perpetual monetary tribute known as the jizya. For all the rest - Buddhist, Taoists, Hindus, Pagans and Atheists - the options are only two: convert or die.

Islam officially divides the globe into two camps; Dar-el-Islam (the World of Islam) and Dar-el-Harb (the World of War). This stance entails the conviction that the only means by which final global peace may be attained is the total elimination of the Dar el Harb, and the establishment of a Global Muslim Caliphate ruled by Shari'a law. Those who choose to embark upon Jihad (actually, it is described in the Qu'ran as a duty rather than as a choice just like Christian witnessing is in the Bible) and are killed (martyred) while engaging in it, are Qu'ranically assured of a Paradise in which they may perpetually and guiltlessly enjoy practically all of the pleasures that are religiously forbidden to living Muslims; those who live are Qu'ranically permitted to take possession of the spoils of war, be they the property or the women of the conquered and/or slain infidels. This stance is, of course, patently hegemonistic and militantly imperialistic, and becomes even more appealing to poor male Muslim youth, when they see their chances of having their own (appealing) wife as negligible (since the more wealthy Muslims are religiously free to marry as many as four of them each - as long as they can financially support them all). When one takes a look at the historical spread of Islam, primarily by coercion and conflict, from its inception in the Arabian Peninsula some 1300 years ago to its reach from Spain to the Philippines today, and one discovers that, of the forty-five military conflicts extant in the world today, Muslims are fighting on one or both sides of them all, it would appear that this particular module possesses great expansionistic efficacy.

Supporting this memetic module are some others, such as the doctrine that all humans are naturally born as Muslims, and that those who profess other beliefs have fallen into apostasy (and thus must be rescued from their error or suffer the dire consequences), and the dictum that people are free to convert TO Islam - in fact, as we have seen, the 'inducements' are quite formidable - but that to convert FROM Islam to anything else (or, in the case of atheists and agnostics, to nothing) is a religious crime for which the punishment of death is prescribed. It is also better for one's assimilational purposes if one's infidel target is kept in the dark. Thus, Muslims are religiously free to both deceive infidels as to their intentions regarding them (taqiyya) and to misdirect their attention from those intentions (kitman), in the interests if the greater good - that is, in the interests of the expansion of the Ummah (the fellowship of the true believers).

Now, I'm not saying that all Muslims, or even a majority of them, are inexorably drawn from live-and-let-live tolerance to Mujaheddin Jihadism in the service of the annihilation of the Dar el Harb and the establishment of the Global Caliphate (Daniel Pipes estimates the number at around 15%), but the vast majority those who are not so drawn are very quiet, because the message contained in the memeplex of Islam supports not them, but the militants, and they are quite reasonably frightened of suffering the Righteous Retribution of the Violent Faithful should they dare to attempt to speak out in dissent (Some exceptions are Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, Taslima Naslim, and Ibn Warraq; these brave souls continue to suffer for their courage and integrity, and many of their outspoken brethren have been killed).

Next, let us take a brief look at the particular strain that is presently so globally troubling.

Imaam Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab was born in and lived in eighteenth century Arabia (1703-1792), and promulgated the idea that Islam had fallen away from its seventh century roots, the Edenic era when Muhammed and the Four Great Caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali) succeeded each other, and needed to return to them. This involved a Puritanical purging of all non-Muslim influences, the return of draconian enforcement of religious edicts against infidels, and the toughening of restrictions upon women. Wahhabism subsequently spread throughout most of the Arabian Peninsula and gained significant footholds beyond, but concentrated itself primarily upon the peninsula itself, as the defender of the purity of the faith in Muhammed's birth land, the Land of the Two Mosques. In the early 20th century, the House of Saud brokered a deal with the Wahhabists, and Saudi Arabia was born.

Sayyid Qutb was a Wahhabist born in Egypt (1906-1966). He traveled to the US, and sojourned there between 1948 and 1950. This experience shocked and disgusted him. He was horrified by the presence of uppity and voting women, freedom of religion and thought, widespread substance use and rampant sexual licentiousness. He then put forth the idea that the US was the fount of Jahiliyya (a word roughly translatable as pre-Musim Paganism), and, as such, was a danger to Islam and must be forcibly subjected to Shari'a rule. He did not view the US as a military threat, since he believed that life in such a dissipative culture had weakened and softened its citizenry, but rather contended that its various freedoms and vices were slatternly temptations that could seduce the faithful away from the true path. Thus, for the good of both the faith and of all humankind, the US as it was must be destroyed, and Muslim piousness enforced there. He later generalized this view to include, first European, and later all non-Muslim societies.

Notice that, without Qutb, Wahhabism would have remained directed inwards, and without Wahhabism, Qutb would not have had a pious and puritanical Islam with which to compare and contrast the US culture that he encountered. Together, their contributions combine to create the present Al Qaedan stance that the entire globe must be subjugated to a religious regimen that consciously holds itself in the seventh century. Interestingly enough, the head of Al Qaeda, Usama Bin Laden, came from Saudi Arabia (like Wahhab), while Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, Zawahiri, came from Egypt (like Qutb).

Considering all of these points taken together, it is surpassingly obvious that, in the present era, Radical Islamism is a far greater threat to the continued existence of the secular, nonsectarian governance of open and constitutionally democratic societies than is Fundamentalist Christianity.

How do we, as free, democratic and tolerant societies, deal with the aggressive encroachments of this virulent memeplex? I believe that we're already on the path to doing so, and this is why:

The primordial form of government, one that long predated the advent of the written word, is monarchial, composed of royal masters, typically from a single family lineage that served as a simulacrum of the genetic heritage of the tribe, and ruled slaves, who owed the masters familial bonds of fealty. However, this form of government often entailed power struggles and intrigues by the royal relatives to either lay claim to or to seize the reins of succession during the authority change when the king, czar, pharoah or emperor would die, and this was not conducive to smooth and orderly transition and the smooth continuation of civil order.

Spoken religious myths had most likely been invoked to legitimize royal rule for as long as humans spoke and gathered in tribes. However, with the creation of written language, it was possible to create a form of leadership that would not change or die like rulers did; blueprints - that is, sets of ideas - that could codify the regal rule as divinely sanctioned, serve as abstract monarchs with which to supplement the concrete yet generationally changing kings, provide a common glue which smoothed transitions and soothed the populace while transition happened, and, via the inclusion of explicit tribal history, the encoding of symbolic abstractions of important past tribal decisions within the religious myth, or the insertion of purportedly divinely communicated rules, provide both guidance as to how such transitions should be effectuated, and within what parameters a particular king should circumscribe his decisional alternatives. These blueprints are the holy texts of written religions.

As time passed, certain written religions spread across several kingdoms each, and the kings themselves became in their turn ruled by their ecclesiastical authorities, who held sway over multiple kingdoms; as religion mattered more, royalty mattered less. In such a manner, genetic monarchies gradually evolved into, or were superseded and supplanted by, ideological monarchies, whose rulers were chosen from within the membership of the religion itself, the successor being decided, whenever a ruler died, via the consensus of the most influential members remaining.

Where religious government was itself supposedly superseded, in most cases, its supersession was apparent rather than real. Thus with communism and fascism, the god of matter and labor, and the god of the spirit (geist) of the people and its will to power, replaced the transcendent god of heaven, mind and prayer. Still, however, the master and the slave remained; the divinely granted or prescriptively composed sets of ideas and rules were the acknowledged rulers, but the actual rulers were those who mandated to the general populaces what those rules meant. Hegel was the philosopher who first explicitly described this structure.

The Hegelian master-slave dialectic was composed of Masters (who were willing to risk death in order to rule) and Slaves (who were not willing to risk death in order to not be ruled), and Hegel did not present any manner by which governmental form could evolve past this basic inequity. However, in the past couple of hundred years, a synthetic new level has emerged, that of Free and Independent Individuals, who refuse to rule others, but who are willing to kill and die in order not to be ruled by others - that is, they are willing to, in fact, even desirous of, letting others rule themselves, and will even take pains to free enslaved others, but in return they insist upon the right to rule themselves also, via representatives who are neither divinely chosen nor doctrinally imposed by exclusive vote from within an ideological apparatus, be they priests or commissars, but are instead popularly elected by the populace at large, in accordance with a constitution that, in addition to codifying those ethical precepts contained within both holy and secular precursors which are genuinely ethical, mandates the existence, frequency, and structure of such a process. In a way, the principle of ecclesiastical or commissar vote was generalized to encompass the entire citizenry (just as, in prior times, the Gutenberg printing press wrested the holy texts away from their elite cadres and made them available for perusal and judgment to all literate citizens), and a new memeplex has thus evolved; the constitutional democracy memeplex

In fact, evolution is an explicit module of this memeplex; whereas holy texts were forever frozen in their revealed forms, constitutions could be amended or modified by elected representatives responding to popular consensus in the face of changing circumstances, like species evolve in response to natural selection acting via changing environments. This capacity for evolution from within relieves pressure for revolution, as popular changes can be made to the established order without the need to overthrow that order in its entirety. However, so that the rights of minority citizens are protected from any oppressive 'tyranny of the majority', basic guaranteed civil and political rights for all are also included as a submodule qualification of the popular evolution module. This submodule grants and guarantees all of the memeplex's citizens equal rights and freedoms to individually pursue their own personal and economic well being. The interpreters of this constitution (the written and codified template of this memeplex) are appointed by the popularly elected representatives of the citizens, and those who amend it via legislation are separated from those who execute its enforcement and from those who interpret its meaning, as a barrier against groups of representatives collaborating in order to create and implement mutually self-serving rather than citizenry-benefitting changes, or issuing and enforcing self-serving interpretations, and to prevent the executors from authoring self-serving provisions which they then may enforce to their own benefit, or from interpreting existing provisions in self-serving ways. Of course, the concrete personal and political reality of a citizenry as codified in their constitution can never completely catch up to their abstract ideal, as this ideal is itself a moving target, in constant evolution in response to evolving and expanding potential rights, responsibilities, opportunities and choices, but, as noted before, their constitution can be continuously modified to progressively approach it.

Competition between the governments and peoples of countries that embrace this principle, that is, competition between constitutional democracies, is removed from the politico-military sphere (democracies generally do not war with one another - it's counterproductive) and relocated in the economic sphere, comprised of international trade and the competition between producers for consumers via the manufacture of better and/or less expensive products. This competition of course financially and materially benefits the consuming citizenry, at the same time that it furnishes them with gainful productive employment by means of which they may self-support (self-support and self-responsibility being a necessary corollary of freedom and self-rule). Thus, the constitutional democracy memeplex is likely to appeal to a significant percentage of those who presently suffer political and personal oppression and economic privation under theocratic and totalitarian systems, and are prevented by such systems from having an electoral voice in their government's conduct, making personally benefitting economic decisions, exercising personal choice, or changing (or even advocating the changing of) the nature or rules of the system in order to permit themselves to do these things. This appeal renders it likely that the constitutional democracy memeplex can, by offering people the opportunity to achieve concrete and actual this-world economic benefits, expanded ranges of personal choice, and genuine political empowerment, successfully compete for their cognitive memespace with the abstract and hypothetical next-world paradisiacal promises and infernal threats proferred to them by the Wahhab/Qutb memeplex. The hope for the future of secular and tolerant civilization could well lie in this constitutional-democratic memeplex synthesis proliferating through the populations of the globe, siphoning a large enough percentage of their potential members away from the enslaving embrace of the Wahhab/Qutb memeplex that they are unable, after membership attrition via natural and jihad-related causes, to increase or maintain their acolyte population, and finally ridding the world, via democratic revolution (assisted where possible and necessary), of the remaining totalitarian and theocratic enclaves which continue to employ the oppressive master-slave dialectic, and maintain their citizenries in its stifling thrall.

PS: Do not think that this is a racist stance which I am taking; I am expressing dismay at the propagation of a violent, virulent memeset that may cognitively infect any racial or ethnic classification, and trying to figure out what can be said and/or done to persuade Muslims to refuse to embrace it. In fact, there are quite a few non-Muslim Arabs, and the majority of Muslims are themselves not Arabs - the most populous Muslim nations are Malaysia and Indonesia, and their populations are East Asian, not Arab). Likewise, I am not criticizing Islam alone or in its entirety; the problem we face and the task set before us is to gain enough understanding of the workings of the Islamofascist memeplex to be able to memetically counter the propensity, a propensity particularly inherent in the Islamic memeplex but also present in the memeplexes of the other Patriarchal Monotheisms, to facilitate the spawning of intolerant and murderous mutational variants, such as, in the case of Islam, the Wahhab/Qutb Al Qaedan strain.

Also do not think that I have written this analysis from the standpoint of a hidden Christian or Jewish agenda. Putting aside the fact that attacking the racial or ethnic membership or the religious affiliation of the author of a position, rather than critiquing the merits of the position itself by assessing the evidence presented and checking the logical links in the chain of reasoning by means of which the items of evidence are connected, is a 2500 year old Greek logical fallacy known as ad hominem, I am neither Christian nor a Jew, either ethnically or as a religious stance; I am English, Irish, Dutch and Native American, and consider myself to be a secular humanist with pagan overtones (I tend towards sympathy with both the gender egalitarianism and the ecologically friendly stance embraced by many pagan faiths and their adherents, as well as their typically tolerant and positive attitude towards the freedom of all to make uncoerced and unfettered personal choices for themselves in matters both political and religious, and their opposition to such matters being dictated by some for others). I am not a fundamentalist of any stripe.

I do, however, believe that the one thing that tolerant people cannot tolerate is the coercive intolerance of others. Once people begin to tolerate such a thing, it is a short and slippery step for them to begin to share those others' intolerances, as well as the coercive manner by means of which they endeavor to force such stances upon people who would not freely embrace them (Tolerance: Between Intolerance and the Intolerable by Paul Ricoeur).

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