Blowback and Jihad

To the extent that the blowback theory of Muslim ire is true that ire could be expected to recede with an American withdrawal from the region and American abandonment of Israel.

But to the extent that Muslim ire is genuinely religious in inspiration it will not recede solely on that account.

It has rightly been pointed out by many that the Islamic religious mind, broadly speaking, is similar to the Western, Christian mind from the triumph of Christendom in the early Middle Ages through the wars of religion of the 17^th Century.

It could be said that, like far too many Muslims today, including their religious scholars and clerical leadership, far too many Christians in those times, including their religious scholars and clerical leadership, were about as bloody-minded as humanly possible about their religion.

Christians then, like Muslims today, adhered to the idea that individuals, groups, institutions public and private, and the state were all permitted and even required to impose acceptance of Christianity on others by violence.

All were permitted and even required to punish heresy and apostasy with death, for example, and to punish atheism with death, and to punish sacrilege and speech or other forms of expression denigrating religion, denying its truth, or otherwise criticizing it with death.

And it is sometimes said that, as what put a stop to all that in the West was partly the development and spread of religion-based, Christian rejection of coercion and violence in religion through the Radical Reformation and partly the Enlightenment, similar developments within Islam will do the same, eventually, for that religion.

But the eventual acceptance of religious peace and toleration by Islam is obstructed, if not in the long run altogether prevented, by the critical difference that while no straightforward reading of the New Testament provides much by way of encouragement, much less justification, for such coercion and violence any straightforward reading of the Koran does a very great deal to justify and even demand both.

Hence, for example, while Christianity was pacifist and non-coercive for centuries after its birth, spreading by preaching and voluntary acceptance, Islam was spread from its earliest times by war, violence, and coercion.

This does not bode well for the future of Islam or of the world.