It is totalitarian in that it seeks to bring all aspects of life under the dominance not so much of an all-powerful government, but an ubiquitous need to conform to all the people around you: your family, your neighbors, your employer, people on the street: all can report you to the Brownshirts–and they do have religious police in many Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia, where they can burst into your bedroom to confront you in an act of adultery or homosexuality, and drag you off to be killed or partially dismembered.
It is radical in this respect, in that like the Communists it wants to remake all aspects of life and then make them permanent. In this, it is perfect for people seeking an escape from freedom, and it has long been my suspicion that the child rearing practices in most Islamic nations make their children frightened of the notion of an individual conscience, personal responsibility–at least outside those defined by the family–and terrified of free thought and where it might lead.
Oh, I have more to say, but I’m trying to limit all this.
I will say this: all the recent news, in my opinion, has many otherwise thoroughly acculturated men and women between the ages roughly of 18 and 40 rethinking their lives. They have assumed that they had to integrate, but people are getting away with murders which are making them wonder if this is true, if all the scripture and Koranic study they did when children may in fact be relevant publicly.
Imagine if, instead of being told to love your neighbor as yourself–as many of us were weekly for many years–you had been told there is only one true religion and that everything else is an affront to the only God who exists, and that to rectify this situation that God has commanded religious violence until all the world is brought within the one TRUE religion. That is both a simple and a powerful story.
The story with regard to Muslims is not that there are so many radicals, but that there are so few. Jihad was commonly called the 6th Pillar of Islam for many, many years.