The savage barbarity of the Islamic State, comparable only to the barbarity of other Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, shocks the world. Critics and apologists of Islam alike are calling for an overdue Reformation to civilize the religion much the same way as Protestantism is seen to have done to Christianity. But reformers seem unable to bring Islam out of the 7th century, and I would wager this is because Islam is forever locked in place, not just to a point in time, but also to a point on the map. The biggest problem with Islam is that nothing in its teachings or practices should have justified it becoming a global world religion in the first place.
1. The world is a circle.
Three to five times a day, Muslims all over the world are supposed to pray facing the Ka’aba in Mecca. Originally this was just a spiteful way for Muhammad to turn his back on the Christians and Jews who customarily prayed facing Jerusalem in his day, but the further Islam stretched from the Middle East, the less sense this really makes. Like his contemporaries, Muhammad clearly had no idea the earth is a sphere, and that any line drawn through one point to another eventually connects completely around the world. So because even facing the opposite direction of Mecca is ultimately still facing Mecca, geometrically speaking, Muslims don’t pray facing a certain point, they just pray in the shortest distance between two points. Unless they happen to be equidistant from Mecca, in which case they could theoretically pray facing any direction. His followers have spent centuries developing methods, instruments, and apps to calculate the quibla, even convening a conference of Muslim scientists and scholars to determine how to pray in outer space (which can explain why so many Muslims are prone to believe in faked moon landing conspiracy theories). It seems obvious that Muslims are just over-thinking something that simply wasn’t thought out in the first place.
2. The lunar calendar is inaccurate.
All time in Islam is based on the lunar calendar, from the year after the hegira, to the start of Ramadan. This made sense for desert bedouins without clocks or calendars, but it makes no sense in a modern world with atomic time accuracy and a predictable Gregorian calendar. The Islamic calendar can never be synced with today’s standardized dates, nor can it accurately forecast years or even months in advance. Early Muslims had no idea the time of day was different around the world, and that the moon’s phases appear differently in each hemisphere, making the technical start of Ramadan dependent on local observers in Saudi Arabia.
3. The length of day varies by latitude.
In the holy month of Ramadan devout Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, which can be a problem for Muslims living closer to the northern and southern poles where “days” can last six months. Assuming Allah did not intend for his worshippers to starve to death, one must conclude that either Islam was not designed to travel far beyond the Arabian desert, or Muslims were simply not intended to live in regions like Scandinavia.
4. Nobody speaks Arabic.
The Qur’an was the first book written in Arabic. If not for the spread of Islam, Arabic would have most likely remained an obscure tribal language spoken only in the Arabian desert. Muslims now call Arabic the language of heaven and don’t consider translations to be equal to it. Despite having their holy book locked in Arabic, however, not even most Muslims today actually speak the language (if they can read at all), and non-Muslims have almost no reasons to learn it. Much has been ridiculed about how humans can be multilingual but the Muslim god can apparently only speak one language. And conveniently, it’s the same language as the illiterate desert warlord who used his religion for power, profit, and sex.
5. Mecca is at capacity.
Every year, or at least once in their lives, Muslims who are able to do so are expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. This is a big problem for a city of limited size and a religion of 1.5 billion people and growing. The Hajj, as the pilgrimage is called, is an annual event and cannot be distributed throughout the year. Saudi Arabia’s government has tried to manage the inevitable overcrowding by setting arbitrary visa limitations per each country, which gives Saudi clerics remarkable leverage and control over all Islam. They’ve also restricted access to the holy cities to Muslims only. Still, some 3,000 people have died in the Hajj in the past 20 years due mostly to overcrowding issues like stampedes in tunnels and bridges, or the dangerous “stoning of the devil” ritual. The pilgrimage is a relic of a time when the world was thought to be smaller, less populated, and more difficult to travel. Fortunately for Islam, their religion keeps the majority of them too impoverished to be able to afford the Hajj. If not for the discovery of fossil fuels, even most Saudis would likely be too poor. Of course, if a similar boom were to lift other Muslim countries out of poverty, there would be no way the city of Mecca could handle the volume. In the Islamic fantasy of world conquest, at least the genocidal ISIS seems to readily acknowledge that the earth’s population would have to be drastically reduced if the whole world were to be Muslim.
The goal of expecting Islam to behave like all the civilized world religions is hopeless, Islam will never truly be a world religion in the usual sense. Expecting Muslims to abandon 7th century barbarism is as futile as expecting them to abandon flat-earth models of direction or the lunar calendar. And even though Muslims might say they don’t approve of Saudi Arabia’s innumerable crimes against humanity, their criticism stops short when it comes to fulfilling their religious obligations to visit the country or just to pray facing it every day. To do otherwise would no longer be the same religion, so we shouldn’t be surprised when Arabia’s appendages in the Islamic State resemble that godforsaken desert. Without the cultural attachments to Arabia, Islam would just be a benign unitarianism, for unitarians can’t as easily justify beheading nonbelievers. Islam isn’t just a product of its time, it’s a product of its place. It can no more be taken out of the desert than it can be taken out of the 7th century.