How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

Only one Muslim writer today is mentioned as a frontrunner for the literature prize: the Syrian poet Adonis (the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Sa’id). Adonis is a man whom the world should know better. He has almost single-handed created a modernist poetic style in Arabic that vividly conveys the terror of the Muslim encounter with the modern world. Adonis calls his work an “obituary” for the Arabs, and depicts his people as a sort of Living Dead. “We have become extinct,” he told Dubai television on March 11, 2007. “We have the masses of people, but a people becomes extinct when it no longer has a creative capacity, and the capacity to change its world.... The great Sumerians became extinct, the great Greeks became extinct, and the Pharaohs became extinct.” Islam itself destroys the creativity of Muslims, Adonis argues: “Because Islam—the last message sent by God to mankind—has placed the final seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say everything, that it is imperfect.”