Islamic fundamentalism.

But wait! There is an escape clause. Anyone who becomes a Shahid, a martyr to the faith achieves a unique and particularly pleasant welcome to the afterlife. So for folks like these two who see no hope in their earthly future and are already edge suicidal there is joyous resolution (or so they believe) and release from their current pain. Voila yet another would be Shahid is born. Islam is just the gift that keeps on giving.

https://www.clearquran.com/

Really.

I think a big problem in the world is that most people have not read the Quran.

It’s not long.

That encapsulates the issue for the West. None of this nonsense about Islamism or “the radical wing of Islam”, or “religion of peace”. But in the final analysis, only the Muslim cultural regions/ people themselves can effect a “converstion”. It is doubtful any change can be obtained from outside beyond killing off 30% of their male populations for 3 or 4 generations in sequence.

There may be violently oriented Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddists, agnostics, atheists, etc., but their faiths/beliefs are generally benign enough to have very few murderous adherents. They can live and let live – Islam is not defined that way.
[It does have to be admitted that some religions/religious groups are very strongly oriented to evangelism and “in your face” proselytization, so not quite as benign as most of us might like. When you are convinced, you don’t want to take “no” or “wait a minute” for an answer.

It just doesn’t fit with human nature, ‘the autonomous individual’ fails for the same reason Communism or Esoteric Fascism fails. It doesn’t _work_ for real people, who start as children and inevitably become dependent in old age, who feel a need for emotional connections to other humans and to a functioning society.

Even a century and a half ago, some observers noticed that some white Americans who joined Amerind tribes, even some who were kidnapped into them were reluctant to return. One of the reasons was that sense of connection and community, even in the 19C there was an issue with it. It’s far, far worse today, post 1970s.

Most people, to varying degrees, _need_ that sense of family and community and connection. If one’s own society doesn’t provide it, or, worse, deliberately subverts it, other sources become very tempting. Jihadism is the worst and most dangerous such substitute connection (at least at the moment), but others exist. A lot of why so many highly educated Lefties are so fanatically locked onto their various ‘isms’ is precisely that they’re deriving a sense of self-worth and connection from it. College educated Western secularists are precisely the people most divorced from all sense of tradition and community.

This might also explain why so many liberal females seem to be even more fanatically obsessed than male liberals, because that need for connection and community and family is even stronger in most women than in most men (though men absolutely feel it too).

Jihadism is the opportunistic infection, but the patient was already sick before it arrived.

Well…to be honest for one thing…or at least truthful about Islam. The Masons provide precisely what you describe above but assiduously avoid calling themselves a “religion.” They’re a cult too…but that’s another day’s story.

Islam is a warrior ideology that glorifies killing your enemies or dying in the attempt, subjugating and enslaving non-Muslims and lying to achieve those ends. Describing it like a social club with wacky rituals just doesn’t cut it. And I suspect you know that.