Islam and the Clash of Civilizations

A pseudonymous nonacademic with a self-taught grasp of world history attacks literalist Islam as the gravest threat that humanity has ever faced.

Epoch by epoch and country by country, with a particular emphasis on India, Western Europe, and, more recently, the United States, debut author Panini, a secular humanist American author of Hindu background and Indian origin, traces the demographic advance of Islam and what he characterizes as the material and intellectual ruin in its wake. Nazism and Communism were only blips in time, he asserts, compared to an Islamic conquest that he says has been going on since the seventh century and is now at full throttle. Muslims who accept Islam literally, he says, are obligated to carry out Muhammad’s decree that every state and society on Earth become Islamic or subservient to Sharia law and Quranic culture. It is, he asserts, “a creed of domination” and an expression of Arab imperialism that has historically countenanced racism, slavery, and the abuse of women. He also says that European nations are blinded to what he sees as the threat of increasing Islamic immigration by naïve conceptions of multiculturalism, and he concludes that only a domestic awakening and an American-led campaign to demilitarize, democratize, and secularize Islamic states will avert disaster. Here, he seems to overlook America’s past inability to introduce democratic ideas to Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the main, Panini’s case is passionately stated. His intended audience includes those that he feels may have failed to grasp what he sees as a threat to Western civilization, and readers with an interest in better understanding Muslim extremism may learn much. However, those who follow his exhaustive, sometimes-repetitious arguments may come away with the impression that only a lack of religious fervor among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims will spare the world the titular clash. They may find it heartening that he has the freedom to express such views about a faith that, in its most conservative interpretations, prohibits such questioning. Devout Muslims, however, will be highly offended by them. 

A passionate free-speech exercise, whether or not one agrees with the author’s point of view.