Suicidal Empathy and the Impending Death of Western Reason

Humanity’s trajectory once bent toward progress in a region now dominated by stagnation. Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Levant, these were the fonts of civilization. They birthed the first laws, invented writing, pioneered math, and constructed monumental architecture that still defies modern imitation. Yet these once-dazzling societies, upon embracing Islam, began a long, measured descent. A faith that proclaimed itself a new revelation to mankind did not elevate these societies beyond their pagan pasts, it arrested their evolution and, more gravely, outlawed much of the progress they had already achieved. Inquiry became heresy. Innovation became blasphemy. The gears of advancement, once in motion, were deliberately broken and declared forbidden. I write this today as a warning to the West: by inviting the least capable Islamic migrants to our shores under the guise of compassion, we are engaging in what Gad Saad rightly calls suicidal empathy. The result will not be a Westernization of the migrants, but rather an Islamization of the West. And as the West begins to resemble the Islamic world, intellectually stagnant, socially repressive, and ideologically intolerant, the danger becomes existential.

This claim, though radical to contemporary ears, deserves careful scrutiny. The historical pattern is difficult to ignore: regions that accepted Islam did not flourish anew, but rather dimmed. The Arabization and Islamization of these once-thriving lands correlated not with a renaissance of reason, but with its recession. The culprit, critics argue, lies not merely in colonialism or Western hegemony, but in Islam’s doctrinal architecture: the subordination of reason to revelation, the sacralization of rigid legal codes, and the exaltation of the warrior prophet.

By the time of Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, the Arabian Peninsula had been unified under a new religious regime. The Quraysh tribe, once mercantile and cosmopolitan, had been transformed by Muhammad’s campaigns of conquest and conversion. He negotiated theology like a warlord bartering for loyalty. Early surahs exhibit tolerance and pluralism. Later surahs, those post-Hijrah, commanded subjugation. Even the infamous Satanic Verses incident, where Muhammad briefly acknowledged pagan deities, suggests a strategic theology willing to mutate for political and military advantage.

Before Islam, the ancient Near East was a beacon of advancement. Egypt excelled in medicine, mathematics, and monumental engineering. Babylon produced the Code of Hammurabi, the world’s first known legal charter. Persia boasted administrative sophistication and early declarations of human rights, such as the Cyrus Cylinder. The Levant gave us the alphabet. Pre-Islamic Arabia revered poetry, trade, and oral tradition, its Mu’allaqat rival any poetic canon in linguistic grace.

Islam’s arrival did not ignite these traditions, it engulfed them. Libraries burned. Intellectuals fled or were silenced. Over time, the Islamic doctrine of abrogation rendered early messages of peace obsolete, replaced with mandates for conquest. Islam offered spiritual certainty at the cost of intellectual curiosity. The cultural mood shifted from open exchange to doctrinal enforcement.

While, a brief, so-called Golden Age emerged under early caliphates this window of intellectual flowering owed more to the translation of Greek, Persian, and Indian texts than to original Islamic teachings. Once Islam’s orthodox theologians regained primacy, the window shut. Imam al-Ghazali’s polemic The Incoherence of the Philosophers condemned reason as impotent against revelation. He declared mathematics useful, but philosophy dangerous. Thus, the medieval Islamic world extinguished its own Enlightenment before it could begin.

The West, meanwhile, began to rise. Europe’s Renaissance, though birthed from its own struggles with dogma, ultimately severed the chain that bound truth to authority. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, each reaffirmed the role of reason, experimentation, and liberty in human affairs. Islam, by contrast, institutionalized the madrassa model: memorization over inquiry, conformity over creativity. Where the West forged microscopes, telescopes, and parliaments, much of the Islamic world doubled down on Hadith authentication and Quranic exegesis.

The decline is evident in modern metrics. The 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) comprises over 1.8 billion people, yet contributes less than 5 percent of global scientific output. Nobel laureates in science from the Muslim world can be counted on one hand. By contrast, tiny Israel, with a population under 10 million, boasts more scientific laureates and patents annually than the entire Arab world.

Critics like Harvard’s Eric Chaney and physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy attribute this intellectual deficit to the entrenchment of clerical authority and the devaluation of critical thought. Education in the Islamic world often revolves around Quran memorization. Religious scholars (ulema) dominate intellectual life. Even in secular institutions, a latent reverence for dogma hinders dissent. In many countries, questioning religious orthodoxy is a punishable offense.

Consider the Arab Human Development Reports of the early 2000s. Produced by Arab intellectuals themselves, these reports bemoaned a “knowledge deficit” so severe it posed an existential risk. One report noted that Spain translates more books annually than the entire Arab world has translated in a millennium. Another observed that scientific publication from Muslim-majority countries represented just 1 percent of the global total.

The decline is not confined to science. Gender inequality is institutionalized through Sharia. The Quran allocates women half the inheritance of men. Their legal testimony is worth less. In countries like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, women needed male guardians to travel until recently, and in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan today, women are barred from education altogether. This systematic exclusion of half the population from full intellectual and civic participation further retards social development.

The artistic cost is equally severe. Islam’s ambivalence, if not hostility, toward music and figurative art has stunted cultural expression. While Persian and Ottoman courts nurtured miniature painting and poetry, these were often exceptions operating at the fringes of orthodoxy. The dominant strain remained wary of human representation, musical instruments, and artistic autonomy. Creativity, like dissent, was suspect.

Could this have been otherwise? Some argue that Islam, like Christianity, contained within it the seeds of reform. But reform requires a theological warrant for change. Christianity endured centuries of reformation precisely because its scriptures did not lock interpretation in stone. Islam’s doctrine of taqlid (imitation of precedent) and the closure of the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) make such reform a theological improbability. Authority calcified; innovation withered.

The result is civilizational stagnation. Nations with rich pre-Islamic legacies, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, now struggle to maintain basic educational and economic standards. They have the historical memory of greatness but lack the institutional scaffolding to rebuild it. Where once there were libraries and laws, there are now fatwas and factions. Even oil wealth has failed to translate into human capital. The petro-states of the Gulf buy Western technology, they do not build it.

Which brings us to the West. Europe’s experiment with mass Islamic immigration is unraveling. In Sweden, sexual assault rates have spiked. In France, entire suburbs are no-go zones. Germany’s efforts at integration have faltered amid honor killings and parallel justice systems. The United Kingdom faces rising antisemitism tied to Islamist movements and an even more grotesque phenomenon: for over a decade, Pakistani grooming gangs preyed on underage British girls with near impunity, while authorities looked the other way, paralyzed by fears of being labeled racist. In the US, historically more assimilative, places like the Twin Cities are now home to a massive Islamic Somali population that demonstrates deeper loyalty to their ancestral homeland than to America. In these enclaves, American values are not merely rejected, they are viewed as hostile to Islam and in need of destruction. Integration is not the goal, but resistance and replacement.

This is not a clash of races, but of creeds. Islam is not merely a private faith, it is a totalizing worldview. It prescribes law, diet, dress, governance, and even thought. Its resistance to pluralism is doctrinal, not incidental. While Western liberalism separates church from state, Islam fuses mosque and state. And the mosque, contrary to Western assumptions, has never been merely a house of worship. From the time of Muhammad, the mosque functioned as a military base and political headquarters. Muhammad stored weapons there, coordinated raids, and mobilized troops. For today’s Islamists, especially in the West, the mosque is often seen as a beachhead, a staging ground for ideological conquest. Europe is now home to over 20,000 mosques, and the US to approximately 3,000. Each new structure is not merely an architectural addition, but for some, a symbolic assertion of Islamic dominance. Importing this system under the banner of tolerance risks importing the very intolerance we sought to escape.

Let us be candid. A civilization that teaches children to memorize scripture but not to reason, that views women as vessels of temptation rather than equal citizens, that punishes blasphemy with death but excuses violence in the name of faith, is not a civilization poised to flourish in the 21st century. But while it will not flourish, it can still destroy. And if we in the West are not vigilant, we may allow these backward ideas and the people who cling to them to tear apart our societies from within.

Western civilization, flawed as it is, remains humanity’s best vessel for liberty, prosperity, and innovation. But as Gad Saad has warned, the West must be wary of practicing suicidal empathy. The poor and huddled masses of Islamic migrants flowing into the EU, the UK, Canada, and the US may indeed need help, but by extending it uncritically, we risk importing a worldview antithetical to our own. In our well-meaning attempts to offer refuge, we may unwittingly be facilitating the erosion of the very liberties and values that define the West. It cannot remain a beacon of reason if it forgets the lesson written across the ruins of the Fertile Crescent: when revelation tramples reason, decline is not a possibility, it is a certainty.

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