Islamic non-contribution -- XLV.

Source: "Only Angels Have Wings." All Things Beautiful, 6/16/06.

The Colonel is very focused on the issue of cultural, scientific, legal, and philosophical contributions to humanity.

Our oft-stated belief is that Islam is an ideology that will actively obstruct contributions in these areas with the possible single exception of seriously advancing the art of mine warfare as a manifestation of Allah's greatness.

There is a fatal contradiction in Islam.

For example, if memory serves us, V.S. Naipaul observed in his Among the Believers, the Iranian mullahs hated the West but can not do without the things that only the "world culture" can provide. We think he was referring to Phantom jets at the time.

This is rather like the internet-circulated witticism: Sex is like air. It's no big deal . . . until you're not getting any. Muslims think Western technical and medical marvels are just sort of "out there" like crabgrass.

Theodore Dalrymple has written ("When Islam Breaks Down") of this fatal contradiction:

And the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance.

Would that we had the option of ensuring that Muslims live in their cherished "seventh-century backwater" free of any polluting contact with Westerners.

Is not our point magnificently made when we ask, "What is in the stunningly beautiful technical marvel depicted above (and here) that has come from an Islamic society?"

Or in this, for that matter:


?