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

by David Goldman

From the table below we observe that the majority of marriages are consanguineous in Muslim countries with low rates of literacy and economic development—Pakistan, Egypt, and the Sudan. But even Muslims with a high literacy rate have extremely high rates of cousin marriages. Israeli Arabs are 95 percent literate—the highest rate for Arabs anywhere in the Middle East—but 34 percent marry cousins. Jordan’s literacy rate is 90 percent, but 40 percent of Jordanians still marry cousins.

Islamic religious texts do not explicitly encourage consanguineous marriage. “It seems the well-known Iranian proverb ‘the first cousin’s marriage contract has been recorded in heaven’ is merely a cultural and local custom rather than a religious belief,” concludes a study by two Iranian geneticists.15 What the universal practice of cousin marriage in the Muslim world makes clear, though, is the primacy of blood ties over the mere abstraction of Islamic universality. We observe the same power hierarchy in the practice of consanguineous marriage as in the matter of wife-beating: the Koran establishes the family as a miniature state with the paterfamilias as miniature caliph. The family, in turn, is nested within the clan, whence it derives power and protection. And the clan within the tribe. And the tribe within the state. Muslims marry within their extended family as an expression of loyalty to blood relationships.

Samir Khalid Samir, S.J., an Arab Christian who advises Pope Benedict XVI on Islamic matters, argues that the divinity of the Koran freezes Islam in time. Unlike the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, or the Oral Torah of observant Judaism, there is no human agency with the authority to interpret the text: The notion of the promise or covenant with Abraham, like that of the “history of salvation,” which is common to Judaism and Christianity, is practically absent in Islam. For Muslims, the Qur‘an can be compared to Christ: Christ is the Word of God made flesh, while the Qur’an—please forgive my play on words-is the word “made paper.” If the Qur‘an was indeed “sent down” by Allah, there is no possibility of a critical or historical interpretation, not even for those aspects that are evidently related to the customs of a particular historical period and culture. In the history of Islam, at a certain point, it was decided that it was no longer possible to interpret the text.... The weight of the tradition and, above all, the fear of questioning the acquired security of the text have created a taboo: the Qur’an cannot be interpreted, nor can it be critically rethought.

Iran has failed as a society in the face of the modern world. It embodies a fatal combination of modern demographics—that is, a rapidly aging population—with a failure to assimilate modern productivity. Without military victory (in other words, without nuclear weapons), the forces that rallied to the banner of the Islamic Revolution can look forward only to a relentless pulverization of the traditional society whence they came. Such is the stuff of military strategy inspired by religious mysticism. When there is no retreat, nothing to which to return, Destiny beckons from the enemy’s lines, and the army leaves its trenches and flies forward into the cannons.

Turkey’s Islamist government, moreover, evinces a paranoid antipathy to the United States as well as Israel. Members of Erdogan’s inner circle financed a 2006 action thriller, Valley of the Wolves, which portrayed American intervention in Iraq as a scheme by Jewish Americans to sell organs harvested from the dead bodies of Iraqis. The prime minister’s wife urged all Turks to see the film.

In the long term, the great demographic freeze will leave the United States the only man standing among the industrial democracies. But population collapse in the Muslim world is more likely to aggravate security risks during the next generation than to attenuate them. A nuclear-armed Iran, and a follow-the-leader game of nuclear acquisition by its neighbors, drastically increases the likelihood of nuclear war as well as nuclear terrorism. America will prevail, provided the Muslim world does not take us down with it first.

So prescient!

Nothing is more dangerous than a civilization that has only just discovered it is dying. The Western world watched horrified as suicide attacks multiplied from a few dozen a year during the 1990s to a peak of more than 350 during 2007. Muslim radicals perpetuated virtually all of these. But there is nothing uniquely Muslim about terrorism in general, or suicide attacks in particular. Men hold their lives cheap when they cease to believe that their culture will endure—because the persistence of our culture makes it possible for our lives to have meaning beyond the brief span of our physical existence.

For a century the Russian Empire had strained its resources by pushing eastwards towards the Pacific, paying for its Siberian ambitions with tax revenues milked from its productive Western provinces—Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic states. Expansion to the East opened up vast regions to the plough and the axe, but at a net cost to the Russian state. It depended on the enterprise and skills of its Western colonies, which rankled under Russian control. After Japan destroyed the Russian fleet and routed the Russian army in 1905, Moscow was compelled to send a quarter of a million troops—a force larger than had fought the Japanese—to crush rebellion in Poland. Russia’s humiliation at the hands of a new Asian power had exposed the folly of its imperial policy and the hopelessness of its predicament. Russia was stymied in the East and challenged in the West by Germany and Austria, and in continuous danger of losing its western colonies, the empire’s only pocket of economic strength. Traditional Russia was disappearing into a morass that had no outlet. The revolutionary terrorists of pre-war Russia were mad and bad, but not stupid. Russia stood on the cusp of a dizzying decline, and the Russo-Japanese War had revealed the fecklessness of its leaders. Suicide may seem just as reasonable to individuals trapped in a failing civilization as it does to a terminal cancer patient.

Germany knew that it had lost the First World War by 1918, but launched the Ludendorff Offensive as a final gamble. It cost over 300,000 German casualties, compared to 240,000 on the Marne in 1914; 170,000 in Champagne in 1915; and 170,000 on the Somme in 1916. During the Second World War most of the German army’s losses occurred after Stalingrad on the Eastern Front and in the Battle of the Bulge in the West.

The first half of the Thirty Years’ War saw armies of then-unprecedented size. The Imperial generalissimo Count Albrecht von Wallenstein raised fifty thousand men to fight the Danish invasion in 1625, and a hundred thousand troops to repel the Swedes under King Gustavus Adolphus in 1630. During the second stage of the war, though, the French sent an army of two hundred thousand against the Austrian Empire, and the Spanish responded with a force of comparable size. The two contenders for the dominant position on the European continent literally depopulated large parts of their territory in the war’s final, terrible phase. Most of the military as well as civilian deaths during the Thirty Years’ War occurred during its last eleven years, when the original source of contention along with the original combatants had long been buried. One might add that Athens knew it was losing to Sparta—and was depleted of military-age men and short of money—when it mounted its maximum effort in the disastrous Sicilian campaign of 415 B.C.E., sixteen years into the Peloponnesian War.

Americans are capable of the same kind of suicidal behavior. The highest casualty rates for military-age men in any war in modern history were registered for Southerners during America’s Civil War, which claimed the lives of nearly 30 percent of adult males. (A qualified exception is the loss of Serbian life during the First World War, estimated at close to 50 percent. Otherwise no combatant population fought to the death with the utter abandon of the American Confederacy.)

The Southern cause was effectively lost after Major General Ulysses S. Grant took Vicksburg, splitting the Confederacy in two down the Mississippi River axis, and General George G. Meade repelled General Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg in July 1863 in the two decisive battles of the war, fought within the same week. The Confederacy faced inevitable strangulation by the vastly superior forces of the North. Nonetheless, the South fought on for another eighteen months. Between Gettysburg and Vicksburg, one hundred thousand men had died, bringing the total number of deaths in major battles to more than a quarter of a million. But another two hundred thousand soldiers would die before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April 1865.

The most dangerous opponent is one who knows that he has nothing to lose and will fight to the death as a matter of pride. Is there any way to prevent such suicidal aggression? Humiliate your enemy, and he will have no pride to defend. A nation convinced that it is already too late to make a last stand is a much less dangerous nation than one that believes it has one final chance to redeem itself—or at least to go down in glory.

World War I is a case in point: by 1914, with a nearly perfect equilibrium of forces between the Allies and the Central Powers, a devastating war of attrition was the only probable outcome. Less than a decade earlier, though, it would have been easy to preempt the conflict. In fact, war between France and Germany nearly broke out in 1905 when Germany demanded an “open door” policy to Morocco in opposition to the colonial domination of France. Germany in turn demanded an international diplomatic conference to put France in its place, but in June 2005, France responded defiantly and cancelled all military leaves, an action just short of military mobilization—which would have been a casus belli. Germany would have been technically justified in initiating hostilities at that point. The German Chief of Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen (author of the famous “Schlieffen Plan” that guided German strategy in the opening days of the subsequent war), urged Kaiser Wilhelm II to declare war on France. A Franco-German war in 1905 would have left Russia and Britain on the sidelines. Russia had just suffered a crushing defeat by Japan and was in the middle of a revolution. Britain had not yet signed a military alliance with France. The result probably would have been a repeat of the Franco-Prussian War, which Germany won in six weeks. If France had been decisively humiliated in 1905, Germany would have emerged as the dominant European power, and no world war would have ensued.

Wishful thinking, perhaps. Britain might well have invaded anyways.

The Carter administration had showed no will to meet the Soviet challenge, so the Germans individually and collectively made their deals with Moscow. That was true of the circle around German chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Russia’s proposed natural gas pipeline to Western Europe was to be the Trojan horse for economic integration of German industry with the weak Russian economy. German defeatism had rational grounds: Russian military strength on the European front dwarfed that of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If Russia had launched a conventional or nuclear attack on Germany, NATO doctrine called for the United States to retaliate with a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. No such thing would ever have happened, of course, for no U.S. president would risk a strike against the American homeland to save Germany. Even if the U.S. had been willing to meet its obligation, the Germans would never have known who had won World War III—for all of them would have been dead. Thus Germany’s ruling Social Democratic Party in 1982 saw little incentive to stick with the American alliance, and Russia had every hope of turning Europe into a satrapy. Installing Pershing II nuclear missiles in Germany with a six-minute flight time to Moscow was a decisive act of preemption. The missiles turned the tables on the Soviets. Were Russia to attack Germany, the Pershings would strike Russia. If Russia were then to launch nuclear missiles against the United States, the response would be a...

an annihilating counter-strike. No Russian premier would sacrifice the Russian homeland for Europe. Thus the Russians sponsored an enormous “peace movement” to prevent the deployment of the Pershings. Once the intermediate-range missiles were installed in 1983, and once the U.S. was embarked on the Strategic Defense Initiative, Russia had lost the Cold War.

Once the Pershings were installed, NATO was poised to win without a fight. But the story of a near-nuclear confrontation conceals a deeper truth. Some of the Russian leadership preferred a preemptive war against the West as an alternative to inevitable defeat. Fortunately, Andropov overruled them. Rather than fight to extinction, the Soviet Union chose to go quietly. To win the Cold War, the Reagan administration took a risk that seemed frightful in November 1983. But the likelihood that an aging and exhausted Russian leadership would sacrifice the Russian homeland in a nuclear exchange was small. Stalin had long since extirpated the apocalyptic messianism that had motivated the grandfathers of the Soviet leadership, the terrorists of 1900 to 1917. The Politburo of 1983 were not revolutionary fanatics but bureaucratic survivors of the Stalinist terror. Reagan’s people were counting on it. CIA Director Bill Casey quipped at the time, “These guys must be exhausted over there. These damn Politburo meetings go on for hours—by the time the guy gets back to his dacha he just wants to have a drink. All they want to do is enjoy being at the top, and we’re not letting them do it.”7 The United States won the Cold War by presenting the Russians with convincing superiority in weapons (American dominance of the skies), the threat of even greater superiority (Strategic Defense Initiative), forward defense (installation of the Pershing medium-range missiles), and aggressive response to R...

Russian insurgencies.

Archaeologists tell us that every city in the Eastern Mediterranean burned between 1206 and 1150 B.C.E. The prehistoric Greek civilization of Mycenae, the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor, and the Egyptian Empire in Syria and Canaan disappeared into a Dark Age more than a millennium before the birth of Christ. We read of this first Great Extinction in the accounts of the fall of Troy, Mycenae, and Jericho. The Hittite Empire had already buried countless little cultures in the sands of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. We hear a distant echo of Hittite and Assyrian conquests in the names of the nations that Rome absorbed or destroyed: the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, and Pannonians. Of most of these dead cultures we know nothing at all; the very few of whose existence we are aware typically left nothing behind but a desiccated sandal strap or a pottery shard. Linguist David Crystal estimates that somewhere between 64,000 and 140,000 languages have been spoken over the course of human history.2 That is not an actual count, of course, but rather a statistical estimate based on analysis of the rate of mutation of the few languages we know; we cannot count the vast majority of dead languages because no trace of them remains. We have written records of only seventy-five extinct languages which once were spoken between the Atlantic and the Black Sea: Bithynian, Cicilian, Phrygian, Sumerian, Hittite, and Elamite, among them. Most of these rec...

records are fragmentary. A single book survives from the rich literature of the Etruscans, the Italian people whom Rome conquered and absorbed, but it is unreadable, for we can decipher only a few words of their lost language.

The sadness of this circumstance is worth a moment’s reflection. A hundred thousand times, perhaps, warriors’ chants and mothers’ lullabies, tales and songs handed down through generations, lovers’ laments and sacred hymns, the hopes and memories of a people—all of these came to nothing. Human beings like us loved, fought, farmed, hunted, built, worshipped, raised their young, and buried their dead. But they have vanished into dust so fine that no trace of them sticks to the sieves of the archaeologists.

The second Great Extinction destroyed Hellenistic civilization in the first two centuries B.C.E. The third made an end of ancient Rome. We are living through the fourth and most devastating, which perhaps only a tenth of all living languages will survive. Innumerable Great Extinctions must have occurred in a past so remote that neither tale nor artifact has survived.

Why did these civilizations die? A too-simple answer is conquest by other peoples, or the ravages of famine and disease. The foot soldiers of invading tribes wielding the new iron swords and javelin-throwers, according to one theory, learned to defeat the expensively maintained chariot-and-archer armies of Bronze Age cities. But the peoples of the ancient world did not understand the matter so simply. The Hebrew Bible, the epics of Homer, and the tragedies of Athens’ sixth-century golden age, each in their own way, offer a different explanation: these ancient civilizations destroyed themselves from within before the conquerors came. The invading Hellenes replaced the people who had built the palace at Mycenae, but they kept their stories. What we now call Western literature began in morality plays at a religious festival, which also offered a public lesson in statecraft. Half a millennium later the tragic playwrights of classical Athens still retold the errors of the kings of Mycenae.

Sparta’s caste of citizen-soldiers, dedicated from childhood to military service, had once created armies that no force in the ancient world could withstand. But Sparta’s hegemony was broken forever at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C.E., by a Theban army under the command of Epaminondas. In his Politics, Aristotle says of Sparta’s humiliation by a second-rate Greek power that the city-state “sank under a single defeat; the want of men was their ruin.” Sparta once had ten thousand citizens, but by the middle of the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle reports, the number had shrunk to only one thousand. Aristotle’s observation is doubly remarkable. It is the first report in history of depopulation due to a reluctance to raise children. It is also the first time that the decline of a great power is blamed on depopulation.

Greek religion does not propose to overcome death, but only to flee from it for a while—into the arms of perpetual youth. If, as Rose Castorini said in Moonstruck, modern men chase women because they want to live forever, Greek men found that the search for eternity was served better by chasing a youthful version of themselves. The older lover worships his own youthful image in the form of his adolescent beloved. Where the Hebrew religion channeled the sexual impulse into marriage and procreation within a covenantal community, Greek religion linked the martial defense of the polis to the lover’s vicarious return to youth through his erômenos. The separation of sexuality from procreation in Greek culture helps explain the terrible demographic decay that Greece would suffer during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.

Slave labor and tribute from conquered provinces relieved a great deal of the population of Athens—and, later, most of the population of Rome—of the need to work for food. In place of smallholding farmers, the fifth-century Athenians and the first-century Romans became soldiers and slave-masters. Half of Periclean Athens’ food supply was imported and paid for with tribute from subject cities.11 And as soon as the constraints of traditional society fell away, the Athenians stopped raising children. Within an oligarchy, families jostle for control, and their chances of maintaining power depend on concentration of wealth. As Aristotle observed of Sparta, the oligarchical model—in contrast to the system of free-holding farmers elsewhere in Greece—led gradually to depopulation.

Thucydides, the chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, tells the same woeful story as Aristophanes. He blames the catastrophic Athenian campaign in Sicily during 413-415 B.C.E., and his city’s ultimate humiliation, on the Athenians’ desire for imperial booty. Athenian democracy voted to attack a fellow democracy, the Sicilian city of Syracuse, “on a slight pretext, which looked reasonable, [but] was in fact aiming at conquering the whole of Sicily.... The general masses and the average soldier himself saw the prospect of getting pay for the time being and of adding to the empire so as to secure permanent paid employment in the future.”14 Athens lost its fleet and forty thousand men in the adventure, along with most of its empire.

In 401 B.C.E. the citizens of Athens assembled at the foot of the Acropolis for the Festival of Dionysus to hear the last work of Sophocles, perhaps the greatest playwright in classical history. The author had died four years earlier, just short of his ninetieth birthday. Three years before the premiere of his final play, Oedipus at Colonus, his exhausted city had accepted a humiliating peace, ending the two-generation war with Sparta. Athens had lost its empire and its maritime preeminence in the Aegean Sea, as well as three-fifths of its military-age population—an unimaginable toll by modern standards—in the just-concluded Peloponnesian War. Sophocles’ protagonist, the ruined King Oedipus who wandered the earth after gouging out his own eyes, was a synecdoche for Athens herself. As the chorus circled the stage in the stately dance of ancient tragedy, it sang the saddest words in the high literature of the West: Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life’s coils Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life.

Greek civilization lost its will to live, prefiguring the condition of Europe today. Western historians and philosophers who reject religious faith in the Jewish or Christian tradition and seek a secular model for rationality and political freedom—as, for example, the late Leo Strauss—usually look for a spiritual home in classical Greece. The contributions of Greek civilization are beyond dispute. But in a more decisive way, ancient Hellas presents a cautionary model of civilizational suicide. Which brings us to Spengler’s Universal Law # 19: Pagan faith, however powerful, turns into Stygian nihilism when disappointed.

This is very biased. Pagan China will outlast us all.

The crowning achievements of Greek classical culture occurred in the aftermath of Athens’ ruin at the hands of Sparta. Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all sought to identify the systemic flaws that ruined Athens, and failed. Plato’s dystopic vision of a polis governed by philosopher kings repels us, whether we read The Republic as prescription or (as some suggest) a reduction to absurdity. Socrates ridiculed Athenian fecklessness, but offered no cure. As Soren Kierkegaard put it, he was an ironist, not a prophet: he looked backward but not forward, and offered a diagnosis but not a cure.17 The democratic party condemned Socrates to death by a 360-140 jury vote. And Aristotle in his Politics saw only an endless swing of the pendulum between democracy and oligarchy.

Rome worked its slaves to death and required fresh supplies through new conquests (unlike the American South, where the slave population rose through natural increase). A high proportion of recently captured slaves came from the same barbarian tribes that were about to invade Rome, and they deserted their Roman masters to join the invading Germanic tribes. As archaeologist Brian Ward-Perkins reports, “Even as early as 376-8 discontents and fortune-seekers were swelling Gothic ranks soon after they had crossed into the empire—the historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that their numbers were increased significantly, not only by fleeing Gothic slaves, but also by miners escaping the harsh conditions of the state’s gold mines and by people oppressed by the burden of imperial taxation.” Ward-Perkins cites a contemporary Roman source who observed that during the Goths’ siege of Rome in the winter of 408–409, “Almost all the slaves who were in Rome, poured out of the city to join the barbarians.”

So the first frost of the coming demographic winter was already felt in the France of 1840, just two generations after the French Revolution. Not gradual attrition of traditional society by modernization, but the sudden upheaval of revolution and war had transformed France from a country of peasants. The French Revolution was the world’s first attempt to found a society upon reason rather than religion. Specialists still debate the causes of the great French fertility decline in the nineteenth century. The usual factors such as urbanization and literacy do not explain it. Some demographers argue that the contraceptive methods employed by a licentious aristocracy at Europe’s most hedonistic court were adopted by the population at large.33 Perhaps Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the national humiliation France suffered in its aftermath played a role. Perhaps the secularism of the French Revolution eroded the fertility of the earlier traditional society. Whatever the cause, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the population of France simply ceased to grow. In 1800 there were 29 million Frenchmen and only 21 million Germans; by 1900 there were 40 million Frenchmen and 56 million Germans. England in 1800 had fewer than 9 million inhabitants; by 1900 it had 31 million. French married couples simply had fewer children than their German or English counterparts.34 Mommsen, de la Malle, and other scholars observed the slow decline of France, once Europe’s most populo...

populous country and now a second-rate power, in an era when general staffs wrote battle plans on the basis of manpower tables.

In 1800, city-dwellers made up a quarter of the population of France and Germany and two-fifths of the British population; by 1914, four-fifths of Britons and three-fifths of Germans lived in cities, along with nearly half of Frenchmen. Only a tenth of Eastern Europeans were city-dwellers in 1800, compared to three-tenths on the eve of the First World War. By the outbreak of that war, the triangle of farm, family, and church was broken. Napoleon had already trampled down the old aristocratic order on the European continent; by 1870 the unification of Italy and Germany under secular governments had destroyed the political power of the Catholic Church.

During the First World War, a German high school teacher named Oswald Spengler saw in the enervation of the ancient world the same infertility that had begun to afflict his contemporaries, and composed a massive tome that sought to explain why all civilizations must fail of their will to live. Spengler’s The Decline of the West appeared in 1918, at a moment when cultural pessimism hung over Europe in thick clouds. Absent the compulsions of traditional society, he declared, people simply would cease to raise children: The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine who belongs to herself—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.

In Kalisch’s account, the invention of the historical Mohammed transformed the Christian message into a declaration that the Arabs were God’s chosen people. The Koran accomplishes this theological feat, Kalisch argues, by casting Mohammed as an Arab prophet who embodies the characteristics of Moses as well as Jesus. “We hardly have original Islamic sources from the first two centuries of Islam,” Kalisch observes. “And even when a source appears to come from this period, caution is required. The mere assertion that a source stems from the first or second century of the Islamic calendar means nothing. And even when a source actually was written in the first or second century, the question always remains of later manipulation. We do not tread on firm ground in the sources until the third Islamic century [the ninth century C.E.].” This substantial lag between the time Mohammed is supposed to have lived and the first historical evidence of the religion he is purported to have founded is extremely suspicious, Kalisch observes. How can a world religion have erupted in a virtual literary vacuum? He quotes Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds: “It is a striking fact that such documentary evidence as survives from the Sufyanid period makes no mention of [Mohammed] the messenger of god at all. The papyri do not refer to him. The Arabic inscriptions of the Arab-Sasanian coins only invoke Allah, not his rasul [messenger]; and the Arab-Byzantine bronze coins on which Muhammad appears as rasu...

rasul Allah, previously dated to the Sufyanid period, have now been placed in that of the Marwanids. Even the two surviving pre-Marwanid tombstones fail to mention the rasul.”2 The trouble with the Muslim version of the religion’s early history lies not in the absence of evidence, but rather in an abundance, including a large number of coins and inscriptions on monuments during its first two centuries that fail to refer to the Prophet Mohammed. “Coins and inscriptions are incompatible with the Islamic writing of history,” Kalisch concludes, citing the monograph Crossroads to Islam, by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren.

If the Mohammed story was invented, then by whom was it invented, and to what end? The answer, Kalisch explains, is that the new Arab empire wanted to conflate the figures of Moses and Jesus into an Arab prophet. Neither the Jews nor the Christians as people of God, but the Arabs, instead, would become the Chosen People under Islam. “No prophet is mentioned in the Koran as often as Moses, and Muslim tradition always emphasized the great similarly between Moses and Mohammed,” Kalisch writes. “The central event in the life of Moses, though, is the Exodus of the oppressed Children of Israel out of Egypt, and the central event in the life of Mohammed is the Exodus of his oppressed congregation out of Mecca to Medina.... The suspicion is great that the Hegira appears only for this reason in the story of the Prophet, because his image should emulate the image of Moses.”

Judaism and its daughter-religion Christianity sought to distinguish themselves from paganism. But what does “paganism” actually mean? In Franz Rosenzweig’s sociology of religion, the animal ties of common ancestry define the pagan order. Individuality in the Judeo-Christian sense is inconceivable, for every member of society must bear the same identity of blood and soil as every other member, and the single member of society can be nothing other than an expression of collective blood and collective will. For this reason every institution of pagan society, emphatically including family and clan, must collapse into the totality. Here is how Rosenzweig described the absence of individuality in pre-modern society: In the thoroughly organized State, the State and the individual do not stand in the relation of a whole to a part. Instead, the state is the All, from which the power flows through the limbs of the individual. Everyone has his determined place, and, to the extent that he fulfills it, belongs to the All of the State.... The individual of antiquity does not lose himself in society in order to find himself, but rather in order to construct it; he himself disappears. The well-known difference between the ancient and all modern concepts of democracy rightly arise from this. It is clear from this why antiquity never developed the concept of representative democracy. Only a body can have organs; a building has only parts.

Allah is not a God of laws because he is not a God of love. It is possible for Muslims to love Allah, but nonsensical to imagine that God loves Muslims, declared Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), still the dominant authority in normative Islam. A leading Western historian of Islam calls him the most influential figure in Islam since the Prophet Mohammed,6 and such putative updaters of Islam as Tariq Ramadan still base their theology on al-Ghazali. “When there is love, there must be in the lover a sense of incompleteness; a recognition that the beloved is needed for complete realization of the self,” al-Ghazali wrote. But since Allah is perfect and complete, this notion of love is nonsensical. “There is no reaching out on the part of God...there can be no change in him; no development in him; no supplying of a lack in Himself.”7 Allah is beyond love and has therefore has no need to favor humankind with laws of nature. As al-Ghazali argues, The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary, according to us. For example, there is no causal connection between the quenching of thirst and drinking, satiety and eating, burning and contact with fire. Light and the appearance of the sun, death and decapitation, healing and the drinking of medicine... and so on to include all that is observable in connected things in medicine, astronomy, arts and crafts. Their connection is due to the prior decree of God...

, who creates them side by side, not to it being necessary in itself, incapable of separation... the philosophers offer no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only simultaneity, not causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.

The Judeo-Christian notion of divine love is what makes possible the rational ordering of human existence: as an act of love towards humankind, God made nature sufficiently intelligible for us to cope with it. For Jews and Christians, the rationality of everyday life proceeds from the biblical concept of covenant. Islam eschews reason. Muslim life is arbitrary because it rejects the concept of divine love as expressed in the covenant between God and man. It might be argued that al-Ghazali in some way corrupted the true faith of Islam, which in earlier centuries included some rationalists. But the Koran itself is consonant with al-Ghazali’s position. The phrase “Allah loves” occurs in the Koran only sixteen times; the remote and absolutely transcendent God of Islam loves “those who do good,” “those who purify themselves,” “those who trust,” “those who act equitably,” “the doers of justice,” and above all “those who fight in His way in ranks as if they were a firm and compact wall.” Allah, in short, loves those who do him service. The Judeo-Christian notion that God has a special love for the weak and defenseless—let alone that God loves the sinner—is entirely absent in Islam. As Franz Rosenzweig wrote, “Unlike the God of faith, Allah cannot go before his own [people] and say to their face that he has chosen them above all others in all their sinfulness, and in order to make them accountable for their sins. That the failings of human beings arouse divine love more powerfully...

than their merits is an impossible, indeed an absurd thought to Islam—but it is the thought that stands at the heart of [Jewish and Christian] faith.”9 For Jews and Christians, it is God’s love that exalts the individual, who is created in God’s image and thus is a fitting lover for the Maker of Heaven. Islam, by contrast, propounds a collective identity, for Allah loves “those who fight in His way in ranks as if they were a firm and compact wall.”

Muslims do not seek the love of a personal God. The muezzin who summons them to prayer makes clear why Muslims pray. He calls, “Come to prayer! Come to prayer! Come to success! Come to success! Allah is Great!” Allah is a remote sovereign who loves those who faithfully serve him and hates the slacker; he may have pity on the weak and powerless but is under no obligation to do so. He rewards the faithful with success. Islamic culture, though, has been singularly unsuccessful during the past seven centuries. A religion that abolishes cause and effect does not naturally incline to innovations in natural science, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the previous fecundity of Islamic science dried up within a generation after the twelfth-century triumph of al-Ghazali’s occasionalist view of creation. That philosophy gives rise not to scientific achievement and technological advance, but to the mad, jinn-haunted “science” of Turkish Islamist-in-exile Fethullah Gülen.

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.”

Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis responded, I believe it has to do with the concept of “oneness” [tawhid], which is reflected—in practical or political terms—in the concept of the hero, the savior, or the leader. This concept offers an inner sense of security to people who are afraid of freedom. Some human beings are afraid of freedom. Interviewer: Because it is synonymous with anarchy? Adonis: No, because being free is a great burden. It is by no means easy.... When you are free, you have to face reality, the world in its entirety. You have to deal with the world’s problems, with everything.... On the other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content and not have to deal with anything. Just as Allah solves all our problems, the dictator will solve all our problems.

Muslims basically worship Darkseid.