I think the thesis is correct, that this Islam is moribund. The key is their lack of a magisterium, a term borrowed from the Church which means there is an unalterable tradition, presumably initially given from the Deity, as well as a continuing authority with power to interpret the tradition for the times. Shi’a have one, but they are a small minority, and they have another problem, their branch of islam permits them to practice birth control and it is bringing down their largest nation, Iran, whose birth rate rivals Europe’s in decline. Sunnis do not have an authoritative body, and are so splintered that they could not even send representatives to the table when Europe devised a power-sharing sort of parliament–this was a couple of years ago as I recall. The scheme came to nothing because of the divisions within islam. It is more difficult for us to see because we confront sharia, and it seems like an authority. But Sunnis believe that not only may they modify sharia, they can and will do so by democratic means (cf the Gallup poll of a billion muslims, about three years back). This of course is the deathknell to tradition, as the west has seen. If there’s a vote, there’s an electorate willing to be corrupted. Your religion will spin out of control, and you will be left, inexorably, with a secular state. That their women have re-donned the hijab (that’s new, not old; islam had abandoned ‘all that’ in cooperation with colonialism and imperialism)means nothing, they are not the more virtuous for it, they only did it to awaken from economic oppression under colonialism and then the remnants thereof, and are slowly erasing all the traditional associations with their roles, beginning with education. Throughout the middle east, women are in the majority in every single university, just as women now are in every single university in the world. It is no small joke that women run Iran politically. They are organized, and since they elect not to work, they’ve got the time to play. They use islam as a self-empowerment regimen, just as women do yoga here, only they, with the garnish of revolutionary, do it with so much more flair. And just as our women have here, they have elected to skip all that messy burden of motherhood.

To me, the point is, they’re like the Puritans in so many ways, they’re like us four hundred years ago but with cell phones. And they’ll end like us, at an accelerated rate of course. In stagnation and despair. Democracy is — not the total answer. One needs a magisterium, islam ain’t got it. One must agree with the premise.