Ave, Nomad!

The Lost Nomad sent a few links my way.

First link, to a fisking-worthy article (I'll come back to this one):

Cartoons and the Clash of "Freedoms"

Second link, which produces mixed feelings:

A Kick in the Eyeballs

Third (and most recent) link:

Why Can't Muslims Take a Joke?

A key paragraph from this article:

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

Then there's this, later on:

Globally, we discern a clear link among literacy, secularism, and birth rates; the high birth rates of traditional society fall sharply with greater literacy and weaker religious belief. In the non-Muslim world, literacy alone explains 46% of variation in population growth.

In the Muslim world, however, the link between rising literacy and falling population growth is much more pronounced. In the Muslim world, variation in literacy explains nearly 60% of the variation in population growth, not a surprising result considering that the Muslim world begins with extremely high population growth and extremely low literacy rates.

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