"I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Bedouins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and, for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves. The fortune of the morrow was as dark as death, all ways were shut before me. There came in a W. Aly sheykh and principal of that tribe’s exiles, he was an hereditary lawyer or arbiter among them, the the custome of the desert: the arbiter sitting by and fixing upon me his implacable eyes, asked the sheykhs of the Moahîb in an under-voice, ‘Why brought they the Nasrâny?’ [Christian (Nazarene)] They said, “Khalîl [the Stranger] was come of himself.’ Then turning to Hamed he whispered a word which I well overheard, ‘Why have you not left him -- thus?’ and he made the sign of the dead lying gasping upright. Hamed asnwered the shrew in a sort of sighing, Istugfir Ullah, ‘Lord I cry thee mercy!’ Târiba (the man’s name) was of a saturnine turning humour; and upon a time afterward, with the same voice, he defended me at Teyma, against the splenetic fanaticism of some considerable villager, threatening me that ‘except I would convert to the religion of Ullah and his Apostle, as I carelessly passed by day and by night in the lanes and paths of the oasis, a God-fearer’s gunshot might end my life.’ Târiba answered him with displeasure, ‘Wellah, [Indeed (by God)] the Beduw be better than ye!’ Târiba’s cavilling was now also for my greeting (as they use) salaam aleyk, ‘peace be with you’. It is ‘the salutation of Islam and not for the mouths of the heathen, with whom is no peace nor fellowship, neither in this world not the next:’ also he would let the people know I was a khawâja. This is the titles of Jews and Christians in the mixed Semitic cities of the Arabian conquest."
One hundred years later, in VS Naipaul's Among the Believers, very little seems to have changed. Yet Doughty's impoverished Bedouin, too backward to grasp the complete otherness of an Englishman, despise kaffirs already, for their unbelief only, not even sensing the existence of a culture to clash with theirs.
Hmmmm. This is very interesting. It eerily reminds me of the year I lived on a Maine Island--I won't mention the name here. It is populated largely by families who have lived there and intermarried for 300 years.
Mainland yuppies from Massachusetts and New York--filled with entrepenurial zeal--came, saw, tried to set up espresso bistros, crafts boutiques; tried to enlighten the peasantry--and were swiftly and thoroughly conquered. As they folded their tents and left in a huff on the ferry we often heard them snarling among themselves:
" I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Islanders, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and, for our sins, inveterate dotage of their pathetic, parochial way of life...."
So I'll assert it again--it's not solely the religion. It's the religion grafted onto something far older, tougher and lasting than mere shariahlaw or any other religious conceit. It's the ancient confrontation between the tribe and the revolutionary conscript army--the cosmopolite and the peasant. The latter takes a lickin'--but keeps on tickin'. The former's strengths always turn out to be bakelight and brittle.
It just so happens that in most of the world Islam is the religion practiced by these tribal peoples. Lewis argues that it is Islam which gives them their dignity and strength. I say it's the ancient ways of life that are, in fact, invigorating Islam.
"Experts" are mesmerized by the idea of a "Clash" between Islam and modernism. If that is how the battle will be enjoined then, based upon history, "modernism" will be defeated. Christianity, insofar as it has been reduced to a hobby among some more "backwards" moderns will go down with the bakelight canoe. The "barbarians" who once invigorated christianity--much to the horror of fastidious, "humanitarian" moderns--now battle over state funding for hemorroid removal and anti-smoking crusades......