The Future Belongs to Islam?
I remember reading this article by Mark Steyn over Christmas, and it had a tremendous effect on me at the time. While, on reflection I have to wonder about a lot of the things said in it, there a number of ideas contained in the article that are great food for thought.
The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a “moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation — or pseudo-nation — of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the “Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.
by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.
Certainly, the article makes a good case for certain areas having major problems in the future with regards to ‘the demographics of society’ and it’s well worth thinking about things like Palestine in that context, however, there are plenty of areas where his thought process becomes oversimplified like this example here:
Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.
Granted, in some ways he has a point, but to suggest that ALL Africans are tribal in nature in somewhat simplistic, it is as much about the corruption of political institutions as it is about tribalism in many areas, Kenya at the moment being a good example. Also , the AIDS comment doesn’t take into account the continuing successes in treatment across Africa, and finally, Steyn ignores the recent growth in Chinese investment in Africa and what that means for the development of the continent.
There are plenty of interesting things within the ideas contained in the article, not least of which is the claim that given that there is not such a thing as ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Dutchness’. When this is compared to the sense of identity that comes with being ‘American’ it becomes possible to imagine that Europe will find it very hard to assimilate the incoming immigrants from the Muslim world.
Towards the end he makes a very good point which I have to agree with regarding the unwillingness that many ‘liberals’ have shown when dealing with Muslims and their claims:
In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?
As a final comment on his article, I just have to wonder about his seeming lack of care regarding the fact that nearly a third of the worlds population live in China and India, neither of which are Muslim countries, and at least one of which is a (relatively) healthy democracy. As a gap in the argument it is pretty large. Still though, the article is well worth a look.
