In seeking an answer to Islam's failure, Islamic revivalist movements proliferated over the last two centuries with the aim of restoring past successes. From Wahhabism to al Qaeda, ISIS to Tablighi Jamaat, fundamentalist movements insisted that glory could be restored to Islam by "implement[ing] Allah's laws faithfully," and "every .... human problem would be solved."
However, wherever Islamism has gained power, "the results have not been impressive." The list of failures is long when considering rule under the Taliban, the Iranian revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood's failed government in Egypt, Erdogan's Turkey, Algeria's failed Islamic revival, and the former Sudanese regime's jihad on its own people. "The harder revivalist movements struggled to promote the success of Islam, the more evidence they seem to provide of Islam's inability to solve the human problem." ...
While it is true that there are many converts to Islam in the West, this is because the utopian ideal does not conflict with a dystopian reality. For similar reasons, second generation Muslim immigrants in the West are often more eager than their parents to embrace Islamic revivalism because they didn't directly experience "the failure of Islam" firsthand. "[I]f you've lived under the boot of [a] revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran, you have a much more realistic view of the effect of Islam on a nation." |