I already have, actually. I did quite a bit of thinking about that when someone else tried to put it up as a strategy to hold Islam to ransom. I know what the importance of Mecca is to all Muslims, but if it were obliterated and the Kaaba gone forever, I don't think it would cause any collapse at all in Islam as a religon. If anything, it would create an even stronger focus for the 99.99% of Muslims who would not have been within cooee of Mecca; a determination to avenge the attack both openly and covertly, and to rebuild it when the opportunity came. Islam's iconoclasm would allow it to adjust at least as quickly as Americans adjusted to not have two great twin towers on the New York skyline.
Mecca's centrality is as psychological as it is spiritual for Islam; and its destruction in its present form would accomplish very little by way of destruction of morale. On the contrary, it would create a billion people happy to avenge the insult.
When you're sitting in a cage, you don't stir up the bees nest just outside your reach.
Rifty -- Academic and Computing Help
