Meaning of Mumbai

The attacks in Mumbai, by yet another Islamic terrorist organization nobody's heard of before, have some people lamenting the fact the there is no Muslim Pope. Worldwide Islam is a decentralized, multifarious thing; it has no single hierarchy topped by someone with the authority to issue edicts condemning terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. There is no Pope-like figure with the power to call off the dogs.

But swords have two edges, so we need to be careful about what we wish for. If Christian Popes, even given the underlying turn-the-other-cheek and ascetic ethics of Christianity, could order up Crusades and Inquisitions, what manner of worldwide jihad could an Islamic Pope call for? Given the aggressive ethical base of Islam, the lack of an Islamic Pope is more likely a feature, not a bug. It was Saddam, remember, who dreamed of himself as the head of a worldwide Caliphate, and I don't think his model was a modern Catholic pope, padding benignly about offering harmless blessings to one and all.

To continue the computer analogy, the reform of Islam will have to occur as a massively parallel operation, not a hierarchical one. Slower, but also less dangerous. I think reform is possible, and even likely, because what the Islamists are selling is not at all attractive to ordinary Muslims anywhere in the world. We see repeatedly that the more up-close exposure they get to that shop, the less they want to live under its tender mercies. It's not that Islam itself got worse, it's just that the rest of the world got so much better and has so much more to offer. One would have to count Muslims as extraordinarily stupid to imagine that they do not see that.

The obvious path forward is one that goes through societal and religious reform, not the miserable retrograde vision offered by the jihadists. Radical Islam is purely reactionary, and movements like that are always self-limiting. The overarching long-term trend will be incremental, similarly motivated, parallel reform in Islamic societies across the globe. As with their Christian counterparts in the West, the mullahs will mostly follow and adjust, not lead. The importance of Iraq is its potential to be an example that gives this process a significant boost. Like the song says, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. People who think Iraq was about WMDs are truly stuck on stupid.

Not that jihadists can't produce a lot of mayhem in the meantime, made worse by urban living, global interdependence, and modern weaponry. Jihadist Islam will always have its attractions for disaffected young men with romantic inclinations, and the job going forward is to make that career path as punishing as possible. The US military has been learning a lot about how to do that. The jihadist future is back in the 12th century, and that's where it will stay. The more successful a Mumbai-type operation is, the more widely repulsive radical Islam becomes.

The peaceful ascendency of ordinary Islam in Europe is different, and it's much less problematic. Cultural-civilizational change is the one constant in world history. I hate to see it happen in this case, but it's up to Europeans to decide whether maintaining their own cultural and demographic hegemony is worth the effort. Meanwhile, China and India are developing space programs, so the Sun is coming up fast in the East. Mankind will survive with or without Europe as we have known it.

Byron