As we have pointed out here many times, so much strategic thinking about the challenge of the global jihad is dominated by sclerotic thinking -- not only a refusal to face reality (as pandemic as that is), but also by an apparent inability to digest the evidence of the last few decades. Witness the rather offhanded remark by the great historian Paul Johnson in his essay "The Biggest Threat We Face" in National Review:
International terrorism, in its Muslim-extremist variety, is a world phenomenon. In my view it will eventually blow itself out, probably by the collapse of the Muslim world into secularism. But in the meantime it constitutes the biggest threat that Western civilization faces.
The "collapse of the Muslim world into secularism"? Dr. Johnson, I'm terribly sorry to disappoint you, but the Muslim world was much more secular 100 years ago and fifty years ago than it is now. Early in the twentieth century Muslim reformers such as Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida gave rise to widespread hope that Islam could be brought into line with Western principles of human rights. Political systems based to varying degrees on Western models, not Sharia, were established all over the Islamic world in the 20th century; now they are everywhere under pressure by increasingly numerous and powerful adherents of Islamic law. Even 35 years ago in Cairo or Karachi it was much more common to see women in Western dress than it is now.
No, Dr. Johnson, the Islamic world at this point is much less likely to "collapse" into secularism than it is to do away in due course with non-Islamic government altogether.
And it will do this because we Never say a disparaging word about Islam ?
Because we don’t make any connection between jihad and Islam and terrorism ?
These feebleminded klown are as much the enemy as rank and file muslims.
Im sure they will collapse because they cant take anymore appeasement.
In any negotiation between those who are sworn to destroy you appeasement is a victory for the destroyers, and the movement to genocide continues unabated.
In and argument between good and evil, any consolation by good only benefits evil.
The muslim world can not succumb to secularism as long as it suffers from this pathological need to identify with a self-aggrandizing cause. That is what islam is all about. It is a rallying cry to become something bigger than they are as individuals, because as individuals they are all nothings. The muslims, mired in filth and poverty, even the rich ones, have not been part of the real world for hundreds of years. History has passed them by. Their high school glory years are far behind them. And in that they find their modern day rage, which has Robert point out, seems to be stronger today than at any time in the past. They are angry, sullen, without purpose. Islam gives them purpose, without, however taking away that sullen anger.
Muslims will leave behind the jihad only when they have better things to do. But because they have no basis for science or art in their culture, they can't find anything better to do but brood about their lot. Witness their sense of persecution and of being maligned. So in comes Islam, with its exhortations of pride and vanity, wrapped in religion, to give them a sense of cultural pride, and with that they go on their vandalism rampage.
All because they have nothing better to do. Islam will die out only when those that are muslims, find their gang, and their pride in that gang, less interesting than the world around them.
But as long as islam is mired in societies that do not produce, can not produce positive thought, there can be nothing for the gangbangers to do. And we all know that idle hands, and pride, are the devils workshop. And if there are two things that are common to almost all jihad-age muslims, it is lots of free time and mountains of pride.
Well, that's really great news for my great-great-great-great-great-great grandaughter, um Julie.
What's different now compared to 30, 40, or 50 years ago?
Global telecommunications systems beaming propaganda into every citizen's home 24/7.
Total content control of television, radio, and print media.
30 years ago there were enough non-Muslims still left in Muslim countries, and little enough TV, that Muslims got their impressions of them by actually meeting and living with them. So few are left that most Muslims, especially those under 25 (which is over 1/2 the population given their high birth rates), have only experienced non-Muslims as objects of hate on a TV show.
Why hasn't it collapsed on itself in these 1400 years?
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To: MetroSpy
These T-shirts of prophet Mohammed is not acceptable. Please take it a way. This is like invitation for terorists to attack your country. Islam is very peacful relgion.
From: medawi2005@gmail.com
"the Muslim world was much more secular 100 years ago and fifty years ago than it is now."
-- from Robert's comment on Paul Johnson above
Fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, the Muslim world was obvously weak, without resources, facing an obviously much more powerful and self-condident West. Those who recognized this and wished to do something about it, were the ones who pushed "reform" in the sense of greater constraint on Islam, and the granting of rights closer to what had been granted in the West to individuals. But the extent of that "reforming" impulse has often been exaggerated, and furthermore, it was undertaken by those who wished not to jettison Islam, but to rescue it from what they took was certain decline, and possibly fall, in relation to that West.
The most imporant such reformer was Ataturk, who as a result of Turkey's loss of the Ottoman Empire and obvious weakness, put in place a series of measures designed to constrain the political and social role of Islam in Turkey. But Ataturk could do this only because Turkey was toppling, and he as a war hero, capable of great ruthlessness, could reasonabl present himself as impelled -- as he was -- by nationalist fervor as well as by doubts about Islam. Kemalism essentially replaced the myths of Islam with a mythological cult of The Turk, who had supposedly always inhabited Anatolia and to whom the credit for everything, practically back to the Hittites, should be given. And even before Ataturk's death in 1938, the cult of Ataturk, which became much greater after that death, was an obvious substitute for the cult of Muhammad as The Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. Primitive masses needed a replacement cult, and they were given it. Islam remained, always present, never quite yielding, and of course it has come back in Turkey with a vengeance, to the alarm of the West, and to those genuine secularists in Turkey who did not realize that the only way to keep Islam down was, from time to time, to employ the methods that only the Turkish army could, and used to, employ. "Democracy" in Muslim Turkey will not do it.
Those like Abduh and Rida were not quite in the Ataturk mode, but rather something like those Communists who wanted not to replace Communism, but to permit it to avoid the rigidity, say, of Suslovian apparatchiki, in order not to jettison Communist rule but to preserve it.
But that spirit of mild reform was a result only of perceived Muslim weakness.
Three things have happened to change the perception, by Muslims, of their weakness. They have been dealt with at length here many times before, but perhaps they should again be briefly summarized.
Those three developments are:
1) The oil revenues, the only revenues that could possibly have come to the Muslim states in such amounts, for they required nothing of their beneficiaries, and were simply the result of an accident of geology. Since 1973, the Arab and other Muslim-dominated oil states have received ten trillion dollars. This is the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. The Muslims did nothing to deserve this, though many took the oil bonanza as a deliberate sign of Allah's favor. With that money, however, they were saved from their natural poverty, the poverty that, with Infidel Jizyah removed, is the natural state of Muslim countries. They bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Western arms, and with those arms, a whole network of middlemen, bribes-givers and bribes-takers, and Western hirelings not only in the arms industries, but also in the business of supplying other goods and services to the suddenly rich oil states. The money became the fabled "wealth" weapon of the Jihad, by which boycotts, and bribery, and the dangling of profitable contracts contributed to creating a vast and loyal constituency among some very influential and meretricious people in the capitals of the West.
2) Almost at the same time as the oil bonanza, the countries of Western Europe allowed millions of Muslim migrants -- Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Indonesians in Holland, and then assorted mix-'n-match Muslims from all of these places and others, to enter and to settle and to bring their wives, and to have children, children suddenly taken care of, by the free medical care of the Infidel nations, and the free schooling, and the subsidized or free housing, and the attempts, ever greater, ever more frantic, to somehow "integrate" a population that is almost entirley and incurably hostile, because its belief-system, that suffuses the societies and minds of Muslims wherever they are, had taught them to be hostile to the Infidels, no matter what those Infidels may have provided them, no matter how desperate to win their loyalty those Infidel nation-states may have been, unaware that Muslim loyalty according to the tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam, must be given only to fellow Believers, fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya. This was simply not understood, as the older generation of Wesetern scholars of Islam died or retired, and were replaced by new people, people who were very often Muslims themselves, but even where not Muslim, were by their mental formation inclined to favor Islam and the Arabs, not least becuase of a diseased sympathy for all those who might be seen as members of the Third World, which one might have thought would be a difficult trick for plutocrats in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Libya, and so on to pull off, but pull it off they did. And those miillions, now tens of millions, of Muslims in the West have made that West fearful, have inhibited the freedom of its governments not only in domestic but in foreign policy -- as one can see from the recent behavior of the French in being so fearful of committing a few thousand troops to Lebanon, where they might be forced to behave in ways that would antagonize the ever-ready-to-riot Muslims within France.
3) Technological advances in the Western world have made it much easier to disseminate the Call to Islam to Infidels, and the full message of Islam to Believers worldwide, and furthermore, to offer propaganda -- often of a kind that Infidels find appalling but that apparently work on Believers (who would have thought that decaptitation videos would be eagerly exploited as recruitment tools for those seeking others willing to actively participate in violent Jihad?).
Without audiocassettes, with his taped sermons urging violence, Khomeini might never have been able to conquer, from Neauphle-le-Chateau in France, so many hundres of thousands of fanatical followers in Iran. Without videocassettes, and then the Internet, and then the satellite televisiion channels, Arab and Islamic propaganda, of the kind seen on Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar, would not have been so powerful. No longer can simple pious Muslims live in villages, completely unaware of their duties save for the five canonical daily prayers -- now the whole of Islam is far more readily available to them, with consequences both for Muslims, and for the Infidels, that are as yet unappreciated.
And those who argue that the existence of such new technology also makes it possible to influence Muslim minds so that some will have their faith weakened, have not been able to show how any Western government has dared to broadcast the kind of information about the connection between the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies, and Islam itself. Indeed, one discovers that deep behind enemy lines, Muslims are watching not the regular Western channels, but insisting on getting their news -- in Dearborn as in the East End of London, as in the banlieues of Paris and Lyon and Marseille, from Al-Jazeera: willingly, Arab Muslims limit themselves to Arab Muslim propaganda, for only that is "telling the truth."
These three developments make it impossible for the Arabs and other Muslims to begin to make the connection of their own failures, with Islam itself. Not a single Western government has pointed out --- perhaps not a single Western government realizes -- that the inshallah-fatalism with which Islam is instinct, explains the failure of these rich oil states, after 33 years (and before that there was already enough wealth derived from oil for a generation to have idled through), to create anything like modern economies, surely needs to be said, to Muslims, and to Infidels who might be inclined to believe that they are somehow to be blamed (the usual inapposite invoking of "colonialism" and that "post-colonialism" that has no sell-by date, still can convince some) for the poverty of some Muslm countries. And the continued payment of foreign aid by Infidels to every Muslim country or entity -- Pakistan, Egypt, the "Palestinians" -- is merely a disguised Jizyah, and of course should long ago have been abandoned, and the responsibility for helping fellow members of the umma have fallen to the fabulously rich Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other rich Arabs.
What can the Western world do? It cannot assume the kind of blithe optimisim -- that incautious, and dangerous optimisim, of someone such as Paul Johnson, who though he recognizes what Islam is all about, is perhaps simply too tired to want to figure out how to deal with the problem, for that would require all kinds of mental effort, and prefers to think, with a wave of his hand, that somehow Muslims -- despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the fantastic hold Islam has over so many people no matter what is done by Muslims, prompted by Islamic teachings -- will "collapse into secularism."
Johnson has no evidence for this. All he has is a hope. The kind of hope that used to be called, and should still be called, a forlorn hope.
Those who wish to survive as Infidels, who wish that the most primitive adherents of primitive and fossilized belief-systems not be permitted to overwhelm other, superior peoples and civilizations, those who think they have some kind of duty to preserve their own civilizational legacy, will not be comforted by Johnson's attitude but rather, given his reputation for political steadfastness and sense, feel a certain alarm. Et tu, Johnson -- or possibly something a little less banal.
Bellow says it all. Just because we don't believe the baseless claims that Islam is the religion of peace we are accused of being ignorant. This is the result of decades of Westerners being taught that Islam is a peaceful religion, because Muslims told our teachers that, and our teachers simply assumed they are telling the truth, because our teachers were too lazy to read the Quran. Call it the Nation of Islam propaganda.
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I can just imagine Robert reading that line ("collapse into secularism"), start shaking his head, smiling the crooked smile of contempt, and immediately begin preparing his rebuttal.
My God, I've been dueling with the European Lefties on-line. It's so depressing...the cognitive dissidence, the invariable accusations of racism, the absurd notion that Western historical crimes somehow validate Islam as a religion of peace.
There seems to be a wall of impenetrability on the Left. People simply seem incapable of hearing what doesn't jive with their existing belief system.
I'm losing faith in our ability to prevail in the war of ideas. Paul Johnson is just one more example of Western intellectual disarray.
I need a beer.
Wasn't Iran secular previously?
HUGH: "...rather something like those Communists who wanted not to replace Communism, but to permit it to avoid the rigidity, say, of Suslovian apparatchiki, in order not to jettison Communist rule but to preserve it."
I've always found it interesting that though he was the driving force behind Krueschev's ouster, Suslov chose the role of kingmaker rather than king. He elevated Brehznev - who had no real independent power base - to be General Secretary, but also passed up the premiership and the titular presidency to Kosygin and Podgorny, respectively. As rigid as he was in his orthodoxy, he was apparently one of those rare souls that was more concerned with policy than personal power.
HUGH: "Not a single Western government has pointed out --- perhaps not a single Western government realizes -- that the inshallah-fatalism with which Islam is instinct, explains the failure of these rich oil states, after 33 years (and before that there was already enough wealth derived from oil for a generation to have idled through), to create anything like modern economies..."
Both Qatar and Abu Dubai seem to be making some headway in this regard. Of course it remains to be seen, but both have fairly enlightened leaders who are hell-bent on building scientific and medical educational institutions and on diversifying industry.
HUGH: "Those who wish to survive as Infidels, who wish that the most primitive adherents of primitive and fossilized belief-systems not be permitted to overwhelm other, superior peoples and civilizations, those who think they have some kind of duty to preserve their own civilizational legacy, will not be comforted by Johnson's attitude but rather, given his reputation for political steadfastness and sense, feel a certain alarm."
Agree completely. And while I have no problem with the premise that the West is a superior civilization, I must admit to finding the words "superior peoples" a little discomforting.
from August22's post:
And if there are two things that are common to almost all jihad-age muslims, it is lots of free time and mountains of pride.
I'm not so sure young fundamentalist Muslims have much idle time with "nothing to do" considering the extent to which Islam controls the believer's life. Praying 5 times a day (including the ritual ablutions which precede the prayer), and the phonetic memorization of the Qur'an must take up a large part of the day, not to mention following all the other rules of dressing, eating, socialization, etc. etc.
The study of Islam consumes the fundamentalist believer to such an extent, they don't have much time for anything else, except Islam. This is perhaps why Muslim countries are so far behind in scientific, economic, art, and other achievements, because they only have time for Islam. To a jihadist, an idle mind might actually help them overcome their mental prison.
To a jihadist, an idle mind might actually help them overcome their mental prison......
posted by Xero G
I'm scared to think of what they would day dream about!
Hugh omits a fourth factor that has obviously sped up the process of an Islam Redivivus: 911 and the concatenation of events following 911. (Note to sophomores: I am not saying that, had 911 and the post-911 concatenation not occurred, we would not be having a problem with Islam of similar dimensions to the problem we are having now.)
"a little discomforting..."
-- from a posting above
Discomforting, or discomfitting?
I agree that the way it was phrased, in great haste, produced a result that might lend itself to a possibly unpleasant, though certainly unintended, interpretation.
P.S.: Paul Johnson is half right. Islam will "collapse" into secularism -- after it has been given a helping push from what Dr. Strangelove loved, or when Hell freezes over (whichever comes first).
I'm not so sure young fundamentalist Muslims have much idle time with "nothing to do" considering the extent to which Islam controls the believer's life.
That's my point. With nothing constructive to do, they gravitate towards religion and prayer. That is why their idle hands are so destructive. If they had to spend all day working the farm from sun up til sun down, they would be too busy to engage in jihad, to worried about the necessities of life, and too tired to contemplate it afterwards. Their small minds would have other tasks. But in the modern world, such tasks are, for the most part, missing. Idle hands and a busy mosque make for a deadly combination.
The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is not the cause of, but rather the expression of the impulse of Jihad, and far more important to the revival of that impulse was not Bin Laden, but rather the overthrow of the Shah and the resistible but largely unresisted rise of Khomeini. The Shah was vain, not terribly intelligent about the permanent threat of Islam, and had all kinds of corruption at court. He failed to see how that oil money, and his promised revolution (was it "White" or "Green" or what color was it? I can't remember) merely unhinged the rural masses, and antagonized the bazaris, and all those who hadn't a chance to send their children to the Lycee or Goethe Institute in Teheran. The Shah predicted that Iran would inevitably become the "second industrial power in Asia, after Japan." In this respect his vaingloriousness, and that of other Iranians, is akin to that of the Turks, and both secularists in Iran under the Shah, and secularists in Turkey under the Kemalist dispensation, appear in their o'erweening pride to have retained the supremacist attitudes toward others that Islam encourages, but packaged it in nationalist wrapping. In any case, the Shah's regime did not have to fall had the Americans in charge been people who knew something, anything, about Islam, but they didn't. They were a mixture of simpletons and secret sympathizers with Khomeini as a "man of faith" and these people whose views on Islam and on the Middle East should never have been taken seriously again -- though they are all three still proffering their fatal nostrums -- are named Jimmy Carter, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Gary Sick. Not a word any of them has written about Islam cna withstand scrutiny. They were the captain and the crew on that Ship of State, and Ship of Fools, the S.S. Narrenschiff. More than any other three people in the United States, they were responsible for the loss of Iran, just as, when it came to misunderstanding Saudi Arabia, several names should lead all the rest -- Raymond Close, and John C. West, and Fred Dutton, and James Akins, and James Baker.
The attack on the World Trade Center was not what brought back the Jihad as a central duty. What brought back Jihad were, as I stated above, the trillions of oil dollars, the millions of Muslim migrants, and the too-numerous-to-count-but-not-to-mention technological gewgaws that the Infidels in West and East invented and perfected and distributed, and Muslims employing various instruments of Jihad have exploited for their own malevolent purposes.
"International terrorism, in its muslim-extremist variety...," uhmmmmmmmmmm, WHAT other variety of terrorism plagues the people of the earth right now. Even muslim commentators have conceded that point by observing that although not all muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are muslims.
Terror is a muslim thing. We're not dealing with a rebirth of the Russian People's Will party. This isn't Red anarchists. It's muslims, it's islam, it's jihad.
Does anyone know how Iran portrays Jimmy Carter today? He should rightfully own an honorary place at the Iranian Guardian Council table.
Wasn't Iran secular previously? - question above from baraka66.
As opposed to being under sharia law, the last shah and his father at least kept the moulahs under control and as I recall out of the government.
We can thank dear ole Jimmy Carter boy for the moulahs running amuck.
Paul Johnson is a very smart guy, and as a historian he tends to think in the long term. Anyone can see that Islam is a problem now - it doesn't need someone of Johnson's intellect to see that. The question is whether or not the rush to violence is evidence of a resurgent movement or is it a last desperate gasp of something sinking into oblivion? The answer is not obvious to me, and I tend to rather think the later if anything.
The Muslim 'world' will not collapse into secularism.
Not without a major war and serious, humiliating defeat by western powers. Our appeasement, our constant backing off, our display of confusion and lack of resolve as well as the great divide in our society between left & right, the incessant questioning of basic values and the moral equivalence along with the overall disunity and decay in our society have emboldened the Mohammedans, who have been allowed to infiltrate western countries in very large numbers after many centuries of war...
As one who has travelled the ME & Far East extensively I find the Islamic domination & the resulting changes in Iran, Egypt, Malaysia & Indonesia appalling, shocking & revolting. These places breed fanatics by the millions and Arab money fuels it beyond repair. To assume for one moment that this will just somehow magically fail and fade away is simplistic at best, stupid and dangerous, something that puts us all at risk.
The soldiers of Allah want the bomb. Iran leads, others follow.
Nobody is safe, the situation is well and truly no different from pre-war Nazi-Germany. We have to fight it with everything we've got.
I’ll have to read the article in the print edition but in the meantime let me ask about what Johnson meant.
Did he mean that Islam would spontaneous collapse as we turn our attention elsewhere or did he mean that after being condemned, ostracized, quarantined, and perhaps militarily crushed, it would fall from exhaustion? Overall, does he argue that Islam will disintegrate from internal rot alone or with the addition of external pressure?
As a minor follow-up question, is Johnson arguing against the reformist “Islam can be like Christianity” mentality? And in doing so, does he view the ultimate prospect of a secular society as a tolerable but regrettable substitute for the lack of a vigorous religious practice -- given what this religion requires of the devout? Without the article, but knowing his general orientation, I have to guess where he is coming from. If this is the case, he at least faces the fact that Islam isn’t like Christianity in its beliefs and in its capacity to come to grips with modernity.
Comments?
"The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is not the cause of, but rather the expression of the impulse of Jihad, and far more important to the revival of that impulse was not Bin Laden, but rather..."
Hugh for some reason chose to refute only the first link of the chain and leave out the concatenation. Anyone who cannot see that 911 and the concatenation of events after it, taken together as one kinesis, is a factor in its own right to be set alongside the others that explain Islam Redivivus is leaning too far in the opposite direction, like the William F. Buckley impersonation by Mike Myers.
Indeed, the first link of the chain, 911 itself (I'm not above calling it "911"), occupies a kind of Janus position: since the post-911 concatenation of events obviously did not motivate it (as it in fact had been hatched and planned years before), we can say that 911 itself was a pre-911 phenomenon, but that in the ensuing years it has acquired a post-911 aura by being a symbol of the detonator of the concatenated kinesis.
Could not get to “National Review” to read the essay.
I am familiar with most of Paul’s works and can not recall such “light” statement in any of them. He supports his opinion with facts and logic. I have respect for him and can not explain to myself what happened.
Facts and logic are totally contrary to such opinion. What is it based on?
I’ll wait for a chance to read the essay and see. May be there is an explanation.
"He [Paul Johnson] supports his opinion with facts and logic. I have respect for him and can not explain to myself what happened."
The only explanation can be that, on this particular issue (and perhaps others as well, though I don't know), Paul Johnson long ago accepted the PC Multiculturalist template by which no amount of contrary logic and no amount of contrary data can change the boilerplate interpretation hardwired into the template. On this issue, therefore, Paul Johnson is not thinking -- he is letting the template do the thinking for him. He may be going through the active processes of thinking in peripheral ways, but the conduits by which
noticing data
leads to
interpreting data
which in turn leads to
conclusions based upon the interpretations of the data, which in turn would guide action --
all these conduits are pre-set to a foregone conclusion, when someone is beholden to the template, as Paul Johnson apparently is. And that foregone conclusion which is hardwired into the PC Multiculturalist template is:
Islam must always be detached from all bad things which any Muslims do, such that nothing systemically bad may be imputed to Islam, and alternative explanations must be found to explain all bad things which Muslims do.
No amount of new bad data about Muslims can alter this boilerplate.
The fact that a Paul Johnson would have apparently long ago swallowed the PC Multiculturalist template speaks to the invisible depth and influence it has over our societies. I know others of his caliber who are similarly ensconced in that worldview -- not entrenched as though consciously standing for something against the grain, but matter-of-factly and unremarkably assuming its truths, as though breathing in the air on a clear and sunny day -- while those who would condemn Islam itself are, to them, the oddballs, a minority of hunched-over Islamophobic Morlochs coming out of their holes to blink at the unquestionable Sun.
I am dying to read this article but am unable to load it. If anyone can, could you kindly post it in its entirety? I am curious because I too hope for such a revolution. In my opinion, the country most likely to have such a revolution is Iran. Depressingly however, the percentage of the population that would bring about such a revolution (in Iran) is clearly not in the majority from what I am reading; perhaps making up 35 to 40% of the population. It may be that even those figures are inflated. However, it is clear that there is significant secret opposition to the mullahcracy.
Such a revolution in a place like SA is nearly unthinkable. Iran, Lebanon and perhaps Syria are far greater hopes.
Speaking of the apparently more moderate Islam of 50 years ago, I have an old jazz LP, Herbie Mann at the Village Gate, from 1962.
Among the musical personnel is one Ahmad Abdul-Malik, playing upright bass, described by Willis Conover who wrote the liner notes as: "Bassist Ahmad Abdul-Malik, fiercely blackbearded, strong, solid, swift, and the gentlest of men, is of Sudanese ancestry."
Also there is "Percussionist Chief Bey, white-robed and pillbox-hatted, who has to tell cabdrivers not to take him to the UN, is from Dakar."
If not the latter, surely the former, is Muslim, no? Music -- yea, insouciant jazz music -- is haram?
It is impossible to get to secularism in societies were there is no freedom of thought, especially freedom of religion. A healthy dose of humor is also needed to make the secular message "all religions are equally ridiculous, and equally false" go done smoothly. Secularism cannot flourish where the very act of doubt is a crime against religion and a death penalty offence, at that. And a sense of humor about matters of religion is sorely lacking in the Muslim-majority countries. Pity the poor Muslim who spends a moment wondering, "Would I still find Islam compelling if I had been born in Japan? Or if my parents were Inuit, not Sunni?"
FYI, Read Robert Dreyfus' The Devils Game, and discover (to your chagrin and dismay) that Islamic revivalism is a product of British (MI6) and US (CIA) funding, influence and chicanery.. believing that (erroneously) a religous revival would serve as a counterpoise to nationalism and nascent Marxism.
And in fact the Muslim Brotherhood was not founded by al Banna (Mr Spencer) but the father of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan Muslimoon), was an Iranian Jamal Eddine who deceptively styled himself al Afghani, who was, prodded and supported by the British Empire, just as Osama was prodded and supported by the CIA and Hamas prodded and supported by the MOSSAD.
Us Kaffiri are constantly outsmarting ourselves, aren't we?