Islamic...fundamentalism Jason Soon over at Catallaxy Files has some comments about Islam (which I can't properly permlink too by the way for some reason). He is cautiously skeptical of Islam, but I take issue with the following statement:

Nonetheless I know that in practice most people aren't consistent and the same goes with Muslims - in practice the majority are no more inclined to be theocrats than Christians.

Because in the next paragraph he says the following (which I agree with):

Thirdly I am more suspicious of fundamentalist Islam than fundamentalist Christianity - the former seems to be more like the real thing whereas for the latter you have to go to really wacko cults like Reconstructionism to find anything equivalent in virulence to widely accepted (by Muslim fundamentalists) Muslim fundamentalisms of the sort practiced in Iran and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and in some provinces of Pakistan.

How is it that the majority of Muslims are as tolerant Christians, and yet Islamic fundamentalism is far more virulent? I think the Islamic fundamentalism ~ abortion bomber approximation does not work in the following way: abortion bombers have no mainstream legitimate support. Islamism on the other hand is a strong minority position throughout the Islamic world. Even in the home of "tolerant Islam," Indonesia, extremist groups flourish. In places like Saudi Arabia-extremists are the establishment themselves, while they must be placated in places like Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the Islamic world, the barbarians are past the gates and they sit in the halls of power. In some ways, the victory of monotheism in the greater Western world was the conquest of the semi-nomadic barbarism of the Jews and Arabs (and its subsequent taming) over the ancient settled civilizations. I try to be careful not to overgeneralize, but I do believe that those who point out the divergent histories of Christianity and Islam do have some point. Christianity has been a religion of fanatics in the past-but its first three centuries were shaped as a religion of relatively pacifistic resistance to tyranny (at least perceived tyranny-the Christians were usually a irritation to the Roman government which viewed them as seditious and political enemies). The historical coincidence of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire left the Church an independent power that always remained suspicious of submission to temporal power (even after the Protestant Reformation-the radical Protestants dissented from the establishmentarianism of their own mother churches and created their own sects independent of state power). Islam's collapse will come from within as well as without. Wholesale economic and social degeneracy must occur before they acknowledge the bankruptcy of their medieval piety in the technological age-just as the ancient pagans had to acknowledge the falseness of their magic in the literate philosophical age. But before that time comes-those of us that live in the West must never forget the irrational barbarism that can issue out of Islam. Certainly I've seen its bizarre claims firsthand, my fundamentalist uncle would sometimes take me to flag-burning rallies (United States flags) in Bangladesh. See my ealier post for why I think the "tolerant majority" is a problem as well.