Cultural deterrence?

[ganulv]

True in a geographical sense.

I just have a thing about impressing upon non-Muslims that not all Muslims live in the Middle East. In fact, most don’t—there are more Muslims living in Hausaland than in Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia is the country with more Muslim residents than any other. And predominately Muslim societies vary as much or more than predominately Christian societies do. While I have the feeling that most Americans probably imagine all predominately Muslim nations to be as religiously intolerant as Saudi Arabia or Iran (which I understand to be noticeably more tolerant than Saudi Arabia) during the five weeks I spent in Burkina Faso last summer I was not prosthelytized to a single time. This did not fail to make an impression on someone who grew up in Western North Carolina as a Methodist and regularly was told that they don’t preach the Bible in my church.

But regardless of local variation the Ummah is real. Using this reality as the basis of a new caliphate would seem to be the dream of Al-Qaeda types and the nightmare of John Birch types. My impression is that the vast majority of Muslims living in Metro Detroit and Jakarta are not much interested.