You can't beat something with nothing

Spengler takes up the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the courageous Muslim apostate who is now something of a fundamentalist atheist. She tells Reason magazine that, regarding the challenge to the West from Islam, "there comes a moment when you crush your enemy." To which Spengler replies:

The implication that the West will crush Islam by force borders on the absurd. Western armies, to be sure, could make short work of the military forces of any Muslim country, but what would they do then? Would they order Muslims to abandon their spiritual life in favor of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the heroes of Hirsi Ali? The West cannot stop Muslims from burning in effigy the editors of a Danish newspaper in their own countries.

Secular liberalism, the official ideology of almost all the nations of Western Europe, offers hedonism, sexual license, anomie, demoralization and gradual depopulation. Muslims do not want this. In Africa, Christian missionaries go to Muslims and offer them God's love and the hope of eternal life. But I am aware of no Christian missionaries active in the Muslim banlieue (outskirts) of the Paris suburbs or the Turkish quarters of Berlin.

By contrast, there is indeed a war with Islam, and it is being won in parts of the world where Christians wage it on spiritual grounds. No Christian army has had to march in its support. Europe, meanwhile, is losing ground to Islam because it declines to fight.

Spengler then discusses why it's much easier for a Muslim who loses his or her faith to accept atheism than Christianity (or Judaism). It has to do with the nature of God in Islam, versus in Judaism and Christianity. It's too complex to reproduce satisfactorily here; you will just have to read the column.

A few years ago, as we were ramping up for the war on Iraq, a friend who is also a conservative Christian expressed the opinion that he was not worried in the long term about the threat from militant Islam. He said Western commercial culture was going to move in and shatter the Islamic faith. If memory serves, he chortled in anticipation over how pornography was going to run roughshod over the Jihad Nation. Even though I shared his anger at militant Islam, I rejected then, and still reject, his hope that Muslims will be vanquished by ingesting the same degrading toxins that have so weakened the West. If I had to choose, of course I would choose the freedom offered by the West to the slavery of Islam. But there's a lot of good in the Islamic religion, and I would count it on balance a tragedy for Muslims to trade Mecca for Hollywood, and Medina for the Mall of America.

Longtime readers will remember my account of meeting a Muslim media executive at a conference in the Middle East a couple of years ago. We talked over coffee about how the Mideast was changing. She was living and working in Britain, and raising her kids there. She was depressed to find her younger family members back in the Mideast becoming more and more conservative in their Islamic faith. But she said the situation in Britain was depressing and threatening in its own way. She said sex-and-booze secularism was so militant in youth culture that she and her husband feared for their daughters. She said they just wanted to raise their kids to be normal Muslims, not hijab-wearing militants, but there was vanishingly little space in modern Britain in which to be ... normal and religious. As she told it, if a Muslim was going to push back as hard against the world as it pushed against her (in Flannery O'Connor's phrase), she was destined to become a hardliner. Which worried this Muslim mom greatly.