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

by David Goldman

In the Islamists’ own view, the encounter of Islam with the globalized world has had catastrophic effects on a religion so deeply rooted in the habits of traditional society that it cannot survive in the harsh light of modernity. The closing of the Muslim womb is a symptom of a shock to the spiritual condition of the Islamic world, a loss of faith more sudden and more devastating than the past century’s trend towards secularism in the West. The vast majority of educated young Muslims are alienated from the traditional Islamic culture of previous generations and rebel quietly against the Islamists’ attempt to reimpose it on them by force. They have voted with their wombs. Like Europe, the Muslim world is engaged in the slow-motion suicide of failing to create the next generation. But the flip side of suicide by infertility is jihad. Islamists have responded to the disappearance of what former Iraqi minister of Finance, Defense, and Trade Ali A. Allawi calls “Muslims’ basic identity and autonomy”9 by mounting holy war on the West. The Muslim world is committing suicide. But we could die in the implosion.