Muslims are incapable of love in the Western manner, because they are Muslims, specifically they hold to the tenets of Islam which are:
*Polygamy.
*Lack of free choice by women.
*Lack of freedom by women.
*Tribalism.
*A god who demands submission rather than love.
It is on this last point that Benedict wrote famously as a Cardinal that there was no theological agreement: Muslims hold God can demand they worship idols, suddenly and has no limits on himself, including rationality and consistency. Christians and Jews hold the opposite, that God must be consistent and Rational.
Yes, Muslims are human beings, but they are very different human beings. They do not and cannot by their very culture and belief system love in the way that Westerners love. When you have 57 children as Mohammed bin Laden did (Osama’s father), love for one’s children is a shadow of that in the West. When you have 22 wives as Mohammed bin Laden did, love for one’s wife is a shadow of that in the West.
Women are not free to choose whom they will marry, or marry at all, making relations between husband and wife more akin to that of master and slave, a metaphor that permeates Islamic life (God as the stern slave-owner, Muslims as his slaves). Children are not a precious gift from God given to each couple (think Sarah and Isaac), but rather belong solely to God for Jihad.
Any system oriented on polygamy, tribalism, and the like cannot offer love as we understand it, which is quite recent, and a solely Western development.
Western notions of love are quite revolutionary, offering each man a chance at one woman, who will love him, and each woman the true love and devotion of a single man. It has it’s weaknesses as noted, and is failing in much of the West. But in Asia, in parts of Latin America, it has made great headway due to the advantages it offers most people (as opposed to the other system of polygamy in any form that benefits the Big Man and a few favored wives).
Monogamy and the nuclear family are the exception. They are a recent (Western Europe, around AD 1000 or so) invention, as any historian and sociologist will tell you. Most hunter-gatherer and agricultural and pastoral societies practice some form of polygamy. Stronger in the Agricultural/pastoral societies, weaker in the hunter-gatherers.
Muslims cannot love as Westerners do unless they cease being Muslims (a point Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes). They must reject absolute obediance, to God and his lieutenants on Earth, tribalism, and polygamy. Rejecting any of those makes them no longer Muslim, as Islam demands adherence to ALL precepts, not a buffet from which one can pick and choose.
I’ll go further: the success of the West 1000 AD -1965 was based on the foundations of Romantic Love and the Nuclear family, which spread resources wide and deep throughout society, making the West technologically superior and resource superior. Collapse of same under extreme individualism, consumerism, and women’s unbounded pursuit of “weak/soft” polygamy and the Big Man have allowed the “hard” polygamy of Islam, along with the AK-47 and nuclear weapons, to threaten the West credibly.
Lesson: all people are not the same, how they form families and relate to each other in the family creates their society, and the chances for peace or war with other societies.
This is a hard lesson for utopian Liberals like Dave to learn, yet it is fact.
