Post-295: Believing in Islam

I heard somebody from the UK make this comment a while ago:

“I’ve met people who don’t even believe in God, but they believe in Islam.”

He was talking about Muslims living in the UK, I think. What this means is open to interpretation.

From what I gather, Political Islam is one of the great unexpected developments of the past century. A hundred years ago, around WWI, Westerners believed that Islam was an enfeebled religion, a remnant of the medieval past that had long since faded in vigor and lacked the ability to revitalize itself. My impression is that modern Political Islam was born in 1979, but that even then few people of Western Christian origin paid much attention or worried much about it. As late as the 1990s, it was not a significant issue in American consciousness.

I make some sweeping statements about things that happened before my lifetime, there. I can say this: I’m reasonably sure that neither of my grandfathers, at least, paid any mind to Islam (as a “political” force in the world), any more than they’d have paid to Buddhism, say. They were both born in the late 1910s. I heard them say very many things in the 1990s, when I was a boy, but not one word about Islam or Muslims. I remember being at my grandparents’ house in Iowa when Clinton ordered one of the bombings of Osama Bin Laden, and we saw it unfolding on CNN in their living room. This event elicited no comments from my grandfather about Islam. I remember around the same time my grandfather telling me about a letter he was writing to the local congressman, I think, against the idea of ceding control of the Panama Canal (then still U.S.-controlled) to a Communist Chinese company; something like that. But never one word about Islam.