What Led To Evolution Of Neo-Salafism.

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Those which fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, as they will cease to exist before many generations have passed. That is what hit the Neo-Salafis - i.e., those who seek a new theocracy and who, in the process, display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent.

The Neo-Salafis are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy which orders every detail of human life. They are products of modern education. Sayyed Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian founder of Neo-Salafism, formulated his theory while earning a master's degree in education at the Colorado State College of Education.

In 1949 Sayyed Qutb wrote: "Islamic society today is not Islamic in any sense of the word... In our modern society we do not judge by what Allah has revealed; the basis of our economic life is usury; our laws allow rather than punish oppression... We allow the extravagance and luxury which Islam prohibits; we allow the starvation and the destitution of which the Messenger [Prophet Muhammad] once said: 'Whenever people anywhere allow a man to go hungry, they are outside the protection of Allah, the Blessed and the Exalted'".

The Neo-Salafis feel they have nothing to lose; the fear of cultural extinction surpasses the fear of physical death. Their dream of theocracy - i.e., bin Laden's vision of a restored caliphate - represents what might be the last stand of an endangered culture, not unlike the Nazi hallucination of an Aryan empire. The Neo-Salafis have nothing to lose, but have much to gain: they perceive opportunity.

The way Neo-Salafis see it, Islamic life is dying, but far more slowly than the senile civilisation of Western Europe. Education and literacy appear to threaten traditional Muslim social relations.

In a series on Neo-Salafism, Spengler on Nov. 8, 2005, wrote: "The cliff-like drop in Muslim fertility sets the stage for social crisis a generation from now. Islam threatens to join the list of failed cultures". Neo-Salafi writers, starting with Sayyed Qutb, say the same thing. These radicals are obsessed with survival, to the extent that they are willing to sacrifice their own lives for their cause; but in so doing - now fielding suicide bombers against the infidels like the US troops and Shi'ites "heretics" in Iraq, for example - they are perpetuating an existential struggle. Their ultimate objective is to rule the world through a caliphate; the last caliphate died in 1924 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Although most of their behaviour appears irrational, their underlying premise is not. Their Islamist revival responds to the Muslim countries' failure to adapt to the modern world. Urbanisation, literacy and openness to the modern world will suppress the Muslim womb, in the absence of radical measures.

Radical Islam is born of existential fear. In academic essays on modern Islamic thought, two Islamist academics, Suha Taji-Farouki and Bashir M Nafi, observe: "Rather than being a development within cultural traditions that is internally generated, 20th-century Islamic thought is constitutively responsive; it is substantially a reaction to extrinsic challenges".

The challenge stems from the transformation of Muslim life: In the Middle East of 1900, for example, less than 10% of the inhabitants were city dwellers; by 1980, 47% were urban. In 1800, Cairo had a population of 250,000, rising to 600,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. The unprecedented influx of immigrants from rural areas brought the population of Cairo to almost 8m by 1980; now Greater Cairo has a population of more than 20m. Massive urbanisation altered patterns of living, of housing and architecture, of the human relation with space and land, of marketing, employment and consumption, and the very structure of family and social hierarchy.

The sharp fall in the Muslim population growth rate expresses the extreme fragility of traditional society. As perceived by Taji-Farouki and Nafi, this means a Muslim sense of vulnerability and outrage is further exacerbated by the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of American culture and modes of consumerism, and the hypocrisy of the US rhetoric of universal rights and liberties. It is stoked by Western ambivalence towards economic disparities in the world.

What is remarkable about Taji-Farouki's and Nafi's book is not their professorial observations, but rather the alleged participation of one of the scholarly authors in terrorist enterprise. Prof. Nafi, who teaches history and Islamic studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, has been under indictment in Florida for "conspiracy to murder, maim or injure persons outside the United States". He was deported from the US for visa violations in 1996, and was one of eight men, including three professors, indicted by a US District Court in Florida in 2003 for providing material aid to Islamic Jihad. The latter is a Palestinian group, now active in the Gaza Strip, not the Islamic Jihad of Dr. Zawahiri.

Nafi was indicted along with Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, then an adjunct professor of Middle East Studies at the University of South Florida (USF). Reported Middle East analyst Daniel Pipes: Even after the indictment, Arthur Lowrie, formerly vice chairman of USF's committee for Middle Eastern Studies, praised Shallah for his "good scholarly work". And Gwen Griffith-Dickson, director of Islamic studies at Birkbeck, described Nafi as "highly respected", lauding him for his efforts "with energy and commitment, to encourage critical thinking about religious issues and academic balance in his students, and thus to encourage social responsibility".

Nafi is not the only Muslim intellectual to support violence in the cause of a Neo-Salafi theocracy. Time magazine in 2000 hailed the Geneva-based Prof Tareq Ramadan as one of the world's "spiritual innovators", for "creating a new kind of European Islam that bridges his Islamic values and Western culture". Time said: "Ramadan's chosen task is to invent an independent European Islam... With 15 million Muslims on the continent, Ramadan believes it's time to abandon the dichotomy in Muslim thought that has defined Islam in opposition to the West". Ramadan's reputation grew such that Notre Dame University offered him its Henry Luce professorship of "Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding" in 2004.

Before Ramadan could assume his position, however, the US Department of Homeland Security revoked his work visa on the grounds of alleged terrorist association. Precise reasons were not given, but the Department of Homeland Security was not alone in its evaluation of the Swiss Islamist. France had refused entry to Ramadan in 1996 because of alleged links to an Algerian terrorist then engaged in bombing attacks. Ramadan later took up an appointment at Oxford, and in August 2005 was appointed to a panel advising then British PM Tony Blair on Islamic matters.

The fact that prominent Islamist academics offer more than moral support for terrorism is a leading indicator of cultural despair. A Google search for the term "senseless and terrorism" yields more than half a million hits. If one knows with near certainty that one will cease to exist, or at least cease to exist in a recognisable way, the term "rationality" loses meaning. At such point one feels that one has nothing to lose, like Adolf Hitler in 1939.

Spengler wrote: "That is why the violent proclivities of Ramadan and Nafi must be explained existentially, rather than rationally". The writer added: "Most of the world's cultures will go into oblivion without a fight, either because they cannot or do not wish to fight for survival. Of the world's endangered cultures, only one can and will fight to perpetuate itself, and that is Islam".

Militancy is not unique to Islam. Twice during the 20th century the nations of Europe fought each other for pre-eminence, with the result of their common ruin. Yet, Spengler wrote: "Islam's decline was not an accident, nor is the fearsome response to that decline offered by the Islamist radicals. Born in militancy, Islam among the world's religions offers a unique justification for conquest. The war that Islam will offer the West in its final throes will be a tragic, terrible, and prolonged war which cannot be avoided, but only fought to exhaustion".

Spengler believes "Islam has one generation in which to turn its foothold in Western Europe into a governing power, before the effects of slowing population growth set in". Although the Muslim birth rate today is the world's second highest after sub-Saharan Africa, it is falling faster than the birth rate of any other culture. By 2050, according to UN projections, the population growth rate of the Muslim world will converge on that of the US - although it will be higher than Europe's or China's. Islam has enough young men - the pool of unemployed Arabs is expected to reach 25m by 2010 - to make its stand during the next 30 years. Because of mass migration to western Europe, the worst of the war might be fought on European soil. Over 20m Muslims now live in west Europe; the dean of scholars on Islam, Bernard Lewis, predicts that Europe will be Islamic by no later than the end of this century. The numbers suggest otherwise; the end of the century will be too late.