Islam and the Future of the West

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You shall conquer many lands and Allah will grant you victory over your enemies in battle, but none of you should stop practicing for war.

Sahih Bukhari (Hadith), MO20, 4712

He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning; his blood shall be upon him.

Ezekiel 33:5

In End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate, philosopher Jon Mills reflects on the Taliban attack with machine guns and explosives on a school in Peshawar, in which 132 schoolchildren were slaughtered. The act is almost incomprehensible. “The immediate dislocation of understanding any rational means behind such atrocities,” he writes “is emotionally unfathomable for the simple fact that it disrupts our psychic need for a moral order in the universe.” It represents a “pathological breach” in our implicit conviction that we live in a civilized world. “It takes only one act of barbarism,” he concludes, “to remind us that evil is no illusion.” Of course, the single act of barbarism can be and is multiplied exponentially all over the world every moment of the day, but there exists one world-historical belief system in which such occasions are both justified and mandated.

Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.

The Taliban killers said they were justified in committing so feral and heinous an act as payback for the harms they themselves had unjustifiably endured. What we are witnessing, however, is an expression of what Mills calls the “ethics of evil,” which is nothing less than “the justification of self-righteousness while perpetrating evil under the guise of moral superiority.” As noted, such an attitude is legislated in the Koran. The acts of barbarism associated with the faith are legend and legendary, today as in the past.

The internal wars and televised beheadings of ISIS are no exception to the rule. The hecatomb of innocents carried out by Boko Haram in Nigeria is no exception to the rule. The bombings and destruction perpetrated in major cities across the world are no exception to the rule. The killings in cold blood in newspaper offices and musical performances are no exception to the rule. The more than 200,000 terror attacks since 1970 are no exception to the rule. The October 7 incursion of Hamas terrorists into Israel, the massacre of over 1200 civilians, the burning and beheading of babies, the rape and murder of young girls, the seizure and murder of hostages, is Peshawar many times over. A Hamas murderer standing amidst the carnage and bragging to his parents over his iPhone, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! Mom, your son is a hero,” is another instance of the pathological breach in the plasm of human expectation. He is following and exulting in the ayat: Seize him and drag him into the midst of Hell! Then pour over his head the suffering of the Inferno! (Koran 44:47,48)…