Islamism is not Islam, but it aspires to be and is, due largely to oil money, well on its way to becoming so. Abd-al-Wahhab allied himself with the House of Saud in the 18th century, not the 8th, and many of his more sadistic practices - stoning of adulteresses, for one - were very much out of keeping with the practice of the time. The Sufi scholars of his time thought him a monster. His successor Qutb was hung. This is not "mainstream" Islam but it intends to be.
Its methods depend nearly entirely on modern technology and oil money for funding. A lone fanatic with a sword may kill dozens before he is cut down. One behind the controls of an airliner may kill 3000. One with modern explosives may have illimitable victims unless he is caught. In the absence of computers, cell phones, modern transportation and communications, they are nothing. Without the West they are nothing. Should they become victorious over the West they will again become nothing.
That's sort of cold comfort because we'll all be dead by then - I haven't personally the slightest inclination toward submission and would be happy to help the thugs attain the martyrdom they claim to desire. Like world socialism, Islamism cannot afford to win - it would kill its very source of life, and that is not the Qur'an but Western economies and their ability to generate the wealth that must be expropriated in pursuit of a world that will not allow it. Like world socialism it is a suicidal culture; unlike world socialism it admits it openly.
There is no inevitable progress in this world towards democracy and the rule of law. And there is no law of nature that ensures the triumph of reason over zealotry. Reason itself demands that we rethink the defence of reason.
With that I agree wholeheartedly. The natural human state in the absence of a transcendent culture appears to be a tribalism that fits Islamism like a glove. We see the devolution of culture toward tribalism within our own Western societies - those who deny that transcendent culture - the nihilists, the postmodernists, the socialist opium-smokers - will eventually fail to enjoy its benefits. It may well be that history repeats itself here and the West will be once again defended by that minority of its population that understand it. If it fails there will be no Islamist utopia in this world - the Caliphate will preside over poverty, oppression, and death, and promise a paradise in the next world only for the faithful that it cannot ever and does not intend to deliver on this earth.
Good post.