> Given that choice, I'll take Islam. (Seriously.)
Apparently a lot of people are doing just that.
Some years ago I was talking to a friend in Academe -- a population biologist -- who did a lot of field work in various Latin American countries. I asked him about a phenomenon which had been puzzling me -- the growing popularity of Pentecostal cults, pulling people away from their time-honored Catholic devotion.
His take was that this was just a sanctioned, readable, comprehensible, non-idiosyncratic way for them to stop drinking and pissing away their leisure hours, in the immemorial Catholic-peasant fashion.
In a strange, fascinating way, Islamization and Pentecostalism look a lot like the Third World's attempts to assimilate the bourgeois virtues. NB that our own bourgeoisie was born in a similar way -- those wonderful old Roundheads who lopped off Charlie Stuart's head would have understood Ahmadinejad very well.