Part 4 – How Civilizations Die

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Watchwoman: I’ve been praying for you, dear reader, that the scales be dropped from your eyes, that your ears be opened, and your hearts be prepared by the Holy Spirit to understand Truth because it is The Truth that will set you free.  I continue to pray this for you so that your joy in Christ can be complete.  If you’ve been reading the three previous parts of David Goldman’s book How Civilizations Die that I’ve posted at Watchwoman on the Wall, then you are aware that a defining difference between Islam and Judaism and Christianity is that in Judaism and Christianity God loves His Creations — you and me.  God provided a way to reach Him in the Old Testament for the Jews to come into His Presence and live eternally with Him in Heaven, animal sacrifice, for it is by the shedding of blood that sins are forgiven [Hebrews 9:22].  In the New Testament, God proves that He not only loved us while we were still sinners because he sent Jesus Christ to be the propitiation for all our sins so we can obtain forgiveness and mercy covered by the innocent, sinless blood of Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son; enabling us to stand before the Holy God of the Bible, without dying from His Glory in our sinful condition.  Moreover, this quality enables us to be gifted with grace to be able to forgive others utilizing the same quality of forgiveness that the Christian God of the Holy Bible extends to us.  We hear this in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13 and repeated in Luke 11:4.  What Good News!  For example, women don’t have to fear their husbands living under the God of the Holy Bible as women do in Islam.  Our husbands are required by God to love us!  We read…

RELATED AND RELEVANT HOLY BIBLE SCRIPTURE FROM THE INERRANT WORD OF GOD

[King James Version – Ephesians 5:25-28]  Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; [26]  That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, [27]  That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. [28]  So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.  ▬ Donna Calvin

HOW CIVILIZATIONS DIE
(And Why Islam is Dying Too)

By David P. Goldman
Online Columnist “Spengler”

Chapter 10, Pages 137-155

You’ve heart about the Death of the West.  But the Muslim world is on the brink of an even greater collapse.

Will we go down in the implosion?

ISLAM:
THE ARABS AS CHOSEN PEOPLE

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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.

Which poses a paradox to Islam. Allah is a god who offers not succor, but success. Yet the full acceptance of Allah’s capricious power over every occurrence at every instant hardly promotes success in a science-driven world. Successful cultures produce people whose contributions resonate through the world-scientists, poets, musicians, entrepreneurs, or philosophers. One great individual can transform a nation: Finland with just 5 million people became a force in the world of classical music thanks to the example of the composer Jan Sibelius, the father of Finnish national culture. Apart from political leaders, the average reader of a quality newspaper in the West is hard put to name a single Muslim distinguished in any field of human endeavor. Excluding the politically skewed Peace Prize, Muslims have won only three Nobel prizes since the establishment of the prizes more than a century ago, or one for every 450 million Muslims alive today. By contrast, there have been 169 Jewish Nobel Laureates (excluding the Peace Prize), or about one for every 89,000 Jews alive today. During the past century, a Jew was 5,000 times more likely to win the Nobel than a Muslim.

Only one Muslim writer today is mentioned as a frontrunner for the literature prize: the Syrian poet Adonis (the pen-name of AliAhmad Sa’id). Adonis is a man whom the world should know better. He has almost singlehanded created a modernist poetic style in Arabic that vividly conveys the

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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.”

Nothing less than the transformation of Islam from a state religion to a personal religion is required for the Arabs to enter the modern world, Adonis told Dubai television: “I oppose any external intervention in Arab affairs. If the Arabs are so inept that they cannot be democratic by themselves, they can never be democratic through the intervention of others. If we want to be democratic, we must be so by ourselves. But the preconditions for democracy do not exist in Arab society, and cannot exist unless religion is re-examined in a new and accurate way, and unless religion becomes a personal and spiritual experience, which must be respected.” ¹⁰ The trouble, he added, is that Arabs do not want to be free.

Asked why Arabs glorify dictatorships, Adonis responded,

I believe it has to do with the concept of “oneness” [tawhid], which is reflected — practical or political terms — 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

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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.

Tawhid and Totality

The cause of Muslim backwardness, Adonis contends, lies in the concept of tawhid, or “oneness;’ of Allah. Tawhid connotes not just monotheism, but the exclusion of all forms of thought except Islamic doctrine. It refers more to totality than to unity. As the leading European Islamist Tariq Ramadan explains tawhid, for a right-thinking Muslim, it is literally inconceivable to raise doubts about God. A Muslim, Ramadan explains, might forget Allah, but he cannot doubt Allah. A religion that permits no doubt — unlike Christianity, of which Pope Benedict XVI said that “doubt is the handmaiden of faith” — becomes an all-or-nothing proposition. Either Islam regulates the totality of life and thought, so that no questioning may intrude into its magic circle, or it becomes nothing.

Even in the most intimate human setting, the nuclear family, the collectivity consumes the individual: Muslim wives exist to placate their husbands (“because Allah has given the one more strength than the other”) on pain of corporal punishment. Children are obliged to sustain the family’s position within the clan by marrying first or second cousins, on pain of honor killing. The same totalizing principle that Adonis sees in Islamic society today was also discerned by Franz Rosenzweig in the ancient political order, as noted above.

On the surface, Islam and Judaism have much in common, for example, regular prayer times; Muslims pray five times a day, and the Jews thrice, the former facing Mecca, the latter facing Jerusalem. One doesn’t need to know a word of Arabic or Hebrew, though, to detect a radical difference in the way Jews and Muslims pray. A cacophony of individual voices makes up most of a Jewish service; worshippers pray at their own speed, sometimes singing out loud a few lines of a Psalm before returning to the rapid undertone of

150 – Continued tomorrow: February 17, 2012

Part 1 – How Civilizations Die – Posted February 13, 2012 – pps 137-140
http://blog.beliefnet.com/watchwomanonthewall/?p=12449

Part 2 – How Civilizations Die – Posted February 14, 2012 – pps 141-143
http://blog.beliefnet.com/watchwomanonthewall/?p=12471

Part 3 – How Civilizations Die – Posted February 15, 2012 – pps 143-146
http://blog.beliefnet.com/watchwomanonthewall/?p=12494

Part 4 – How Civilizations Die – Posted February 16, 2012 – pps 147-150
http://blog.beliefnet.com/watchwomanonthewall/?p=12507

Part 5 – How Civilizations Die – Posted February 17, 2012 – pps 151-154
http://blog.beliefnet.com/watchwomanonthewall/?p=12525

Part 6 – How Civilizations Die – Posted February 18, 2012 – pps 154-155
http://blog.beliefnet.com/watchwomanonthewall/?p=12536