The truth is that most Muslims, in most Muslim countries, have gone torpid. They have become drowsy with respect to their faith. They have allowed their innate humanity to overpower the innate inhumanity of the Islamic creed. They have privileged sloth and common decency above dogma and ideology.
Islam in its primitive form is ascetic (except for sex), violent, inflexible, and aggressively expansive. Iran under the Shah was not Islamic. Women were free to dress as they chose, there were many bars, men did not have beards, many people did not pray the right number of times or at all, etc.
As I have said often, the best Muslims are the worst Muslims. Conversely, the worst human beings are the best Muslims.
Therefore the term “Activated Islam”, to me, better conveys the sense that the violence was always potential, it was always possible, just not yet present. The task of the radicals, so called, is merely to activate it, to make Muslims read their own Koran and try to live by it.
And in the West we make it easier to recruit because of our fundamental decadence. You cannot offer an alternative if you believe nothing. Humans are believing creatures. We are tribal creatures. We need to belong, both socially and intellectually, to some larger group.
Nobody who watches Europe can say the are humanists any more, or that they believe in the promises of the Enlightenment. They are superficial, egotistical hedonists who are not having children because they don’t want the responsibility of creating a world they will not cringe to pass on to their progeny. This leaves a gap Islamists are only too happy to fill.
And so we are presented with the prospect of a continent which invented democracy, virtually every major scientific discovery of the modern era, the philosophy of Liberalism and universal human rights, returning to an atavistic stage of cultural evolution firmly rooted in the 7th century. That this is absurd, does not mean it is impossible, or even improbable.