The biggest phenomenon in the world today is the rise of the Islamic right. It is responsible for all the terrorism we experience, and it (together with its leftist allies) is responsible for the feeling that we are heading toward becoming a part of the Muslim world instead of distinct from it. Now I call the Islamic right the “right” simply as a matter of convenience, not because it shares much with the right in this country. It is very far to the right of the right in this country, and the closest analogue in the West would be Europeans of the past who were in favor of having an aristocracy, and even they aren’t that close. But I’m using the term “right” because their program – given how sexist, homophobic, anti-secular, and just generally intolerant of anything progressive it is – is so much at odds with anything leftist.
Anyway, the goal of the Islamic right is to impose shari’a, Islamic law, on everyone in the world, since they believe that Allah has sanctioned, even demanded, such a goal. What would it be like if shari’a were to be imposed here in America and other parts of the Western world? We know roughly what it would be like from examples like Iran and Saudi Arabia. To begin with, they are against any freedom to make our own laws because that involves mere human beings making laws, while shari’a (Islamic law) is law that comes from God. (Of course, skeptics like me insist that Islamic law is really law that comes from people after all, people who pretend or are deluded into thinking that they have talked with God, but never mind that now.) The Constitution would be dumped, and everything would be decided on the basis of the Qur’an.
All sorts of religious customs would be imposed on everyone. We would have to hear the call to prayers five times every day. We would have to fast during the day during the month of Ramadan (and I assume that restaurants owned even by non-Muslims would be forced to close during the day). There would be no alcohol legally available. There would be no freedom of religion as such, though Christians and Jews would be allowed to co-exist with the Muslims, so long as they paid the jizya tax (though I’m guessing that Jews would be persecuted to extinction). All women would be forced to cover up, and there would be a morals police ever on the alert for any woman who wasn’t. Pretty much any progress feminists have made since the 1960s would be reversed or under the threat of being reversed. We have to assume that women will be excluded from good jobs, for example. Gays will be forced back into the closet or risk being executed. Gay marriage would be dumped or else remain on the books with no one daring to use it.
Education will probably become a lot different. I doubt that there would be any secular schools, and even if there were, they would probably be forced to require everyone to take a class on Islam. Some young boys will end up having no education except for memorizing the Qur’an, while girls may not get any education at all. The Muslim world tends to suppress feelings of curiosity about the outside world, so much of what is taught in our history classes will be dumped. Most of our current era will be simply described as the era of jahilliyah (ignorance), and little will be taught about it (except insofar as any of it leads to the overthrow of the infidel). Philosophy will become, once again, the handmaiden of religion just as it was in the medieval period, the only difference being that it will no longer serve Christianity. The main foreign language taught will be Arabic and not French, German, Spanish, or Mandarin.
I also think that science will slowly die. To begin with, science costs money, and we can expect our economy to go into a steep decline – more on that in a bit. Plus, with religious authorities in charge of so many things, they will naturally choose to have more funding for religious purposes than for science. After all, the Muslim world does not do much science now, so I don’t expect much to be done when they take over. This means that the amazing medical advances we now have will not be continued into the future and instead what we now have will slowly decay. Moreover, any medical advance that is made will have to be approved by the religious authorities, and they cannot be counted on to be sensible.
Possibly we will see a return of slavery since slavery is allowed for in the Qur’an, and it accordingly has its Muslim defenders. The fact that there are still slaves in North Africa – that is, in the Muslim world – is not a good sign, and the only question will be who will end up as a slave. As a general rule, I’d say that if you haven’t converted, you will be at risk.
Even things that seem good about shari’a will be bad. Muslims will get rid of interest on loans because it involves usury, but is this really a good thing? Of course not. What it will mean is that there will be many fewer loans. The finance industry in the West can be a monster at times (as the events of a decade ago showed), but it does do things for ordinary people, and one of those things is that it allows lots of people to own their own homes. Without easy access to loans, only very rich people will be allowed to get loans. Of course, it is possible that the finance industry will remain as it is, but with lots of hidden ways of making interest, but that seems unlikely. Despite all the oil money in places like Saudi Arabia, no one thinks of it as a financial capital. People look to cities like New York and London for that. But if both those cities come under shari’a, they will lose their status and be replaced by cities outside of the reach of the Muslims. So, with the finance industry in the doldrums, most of us will likely be a lot poorer.
This is reinforced by the fact that the Muslim world has no idea how to generate wealth. It is known as the producer of oil, which has made it rich, but it was outsiders who figured out that the oil was worth something. Attempts by the Gulf oil nations to produce anything else have so far come to naught. Accordingly, we can count on them to impose senseless regulations that will discourage innovators.
Another important point is that with the imposition of shari’a, we can expect to remain under its edicts for centuries. Iran has lived with it since 1979 with very little to show in terms of rebellion against it. Moreover, there are plenty of outsiders who could rescue them but find it politically inconvenient to do so. If all of the Western world were under shari’a, there would be considerably fewer outsiders who could rescue us, even if they wanted to. This is why it is so important to prevent the imposition of shari’a in the first place. Just never let it happen.
When did the Islamic right begin its rise? I first became aware of its rise when Ayatollah Khomeini took over in Iran. It was the first time in my life when a “backward” country was not trying to catch up to us in the West, but was going further backward. It was the first time in my life that a country had consciously chosen a path to take them back to the seventh century. I had assumed that when the Shah left, the country would become socialist and align itself with the Soviet Union because that is what often happened when countries threw off an American puppet, but it went off in its own, theocratic direction.
There is some talk that the Islamic right began its rise after the Six-Day War had shown the Arab countries that their secular leaders were worthless in terms of dealing with Western imperialism. There may be some truth to that, but it also ignores other things. For example, in her book about Pakistan, Purifying the Land of the Pure, Farahnaz Ispahani talks about the founding of Pakistan in 1947, and it was clear right from the beginning of that country that the Islamic right already had a great deal of strength, and since Israel got going at about the same time, its existence could not have been the spur to the Islamic right’s rise in Pakistan. And Christopher de Bellaigue in his new book The Islamic Enlightenment points out that the rise began in response to World War I. That is when the Muslim Brotherhood got going. However, it has to be acknowledged that there were counter-currents to all of this as well. The post-WWI years were also the period when Turkey began secularizing under Ataturk. And here is a quote from a former Iraqi cabinet minister about life in Iraq several decades ago:
I was born into a mildly observant Muslim family in Iraq. At that time, the 1950s, secularism was ascendant among the political, cultural, and intellectual elites of the Middle East. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Islam would lose whatever hold it still had on the Muslim world. Even that term – “Muslim world” – was unusual, as Muslims were more likely to identify themselves by their national, ethnic, or ideological affinities than by their religion.
To an impressionable child, it was clear that society was decoupling from Islam. Though religion was a mandatory course in school, nobody taught us the rules of prayer or expected us to fast during Ramadan. We memorized the shorter verses of the Koran, but the holy book itself was kept on the shelf or in drawers, mostly unread. [cited in William Kilpatrick’s book Christianity, Islam and Atheism, p. 212]
Things are quite different now, of course. What we can say is that by the 1980s and maybe even the 1970s, the Islamic right was rising everywhere, while the Islamic left was receding everywhere.
Incidentally, there is no talk anymore, such as there was even as recently as the 1990s, of how religion is going to die out and secularism will rule the world. Secularists themselves seem quite content about this prospect, but then they like others seem rather suicidal.
Whichever date we use to pinpoint the beginning of the Islamic right’s rise, it is by now a phenomenon that affects every Muslim in the world, and since so many Muslims have migrated to the West, it also affects non-Muslims as well. It affects every Muslim since there is pressure on them from the conservatives to live the proper lifestyle (no alcohol, for example, and all women covered up), to eliminate secular leaders, to impose shari’a, and to forgo anything Western. Some of its adherents even want music banned.
Evidence for its rise can be seen in the series of photographs (here) that show women at Cairo University over the last few decades. In the 1950s and even the 1970s, none of them are wearing headscarves, but gradually the percentage goes up until today they are all wearing them. Another example is related in the book Of Africa by Wole Soyinka, who says that when he was young, people in Nigeria of different faiths got along well, but then in the early 1980s a minister of education who was Muslim insisted that the uniforms worn by schoolchildren favored Christianity rather than Islam, and he wanted distinctive dress for different religions. (See here.) While he didn’t succeed, he did succeed in “launching a war” that has destroyed the generally peaceful atmosphere that existed in Soyinka’s childhood.
A third example is that of Turkey, which is slowly being changed from a secular state to one governed by Islamic law. Its leader, Erdogan, even suggested a return to the use of Arabic script for the Turkish language (which, as I’ve pointed out before, is senseless since Arabic is geared toward consonants, while Turkish uses lots of vowels).
I’ve been told that countries like Indonesia and Malaysia are unaffected by the push to institute Islamic law, but while it may be true that they are less affected by it, various news stories I’ve seen over the last decade and a half indicate that the Islamic right has plenty of adherents in that part of the world and that they are pushing for more power. Likewise, Morocco seems unaffected by any push toward Islamic law, though oddly enough Moroccan immigrants to France seem in favor of it.
As part of the rise of the Islamic right, there are now groups like al-Qaida and ISIS which promote the imposition of Islamic law. There is nothing to suggest that, if ISIS were to be destroyed, the entire movement of the Islamic right would be destroyed. No doubt, some new group would appear to take its place.
In Europe, the arrival of the Islamic right was first felt publicly with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. That was the first indication I had that Muslims actually believed that they had the right to rule us (though not many here in the West seem to have had that realization). That same year, according to Paul Berman in his book The Flight of the Intellectuals, the Islamic right in France managed to force Muslim schoolgirls to wear headscarves; formerly, they had worn what other girls had worn (pp. 209-210). Things have deteriorated since then. If there was any doubt about the fatwa against Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 put that to rest, showing that the Islamic right means what it says. Likewise, threats against and actual killings of cartoonists have meant a factual curtailment of free speech, no matter what the law might say. In a recent column (here), Mark Steyn says that there are now fewer gay bars in Amsterdam. It has now gotten to the point that young Muslims in Europe are more likely to favor the Islamic right than their parents are and to want shari’a imposed. Most unsettling is the fact that so many (comparatively speaking) young people in Europe over the last few years have run off to join ISIS. They represent the canary in the mine, so to speak, that indicates that something has gone dreadfully wrong. Recently, we’ve seen the ugly spectacle of large crowds of people of Turkish descent in Germany and Holland demonstrating in favor of the Islamist Erdogan.
Finally, the rise in terrorism throughout the West and even in places like Russia and on rare occasions China is all due to the rise of the Islamic right. Every act of terrorism has been committed by the Islamic right and not the Islamic left. The Islamic left consists of people like Bassam Tibi, whom I discussed here, Muslims who respond with a shrug to “insults against Islam” because they believe that it’s for God to judge those people (see Karima Bennoune’s Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, p. 98, or see here), and Muslims who voted for Trump (see here). When 9/11 happened, I spent a few minutes reading about the hijackers trying to figure out if they were on the right or the left, and it quickly became clear that they were on the right. The most recent attack is typical of the Islamic right in that young women and girls were targeted. Contrast this with the way that, say, the Baader-Meinhof gang worked. They never targeted ordinary people in that way, but preferred military or police targets or occasionally corporate targets. The Islamic right doesn’t care whom it targets, even if girls as young as eight are victims.
Who is in charge of the Islamic right? No one. We can’t talk about an organized conspiracy because there are various groups, some of which are hostile to the others. This is a mass movement, but it is not under the control of any one leader. Accordingly, killing Osama bin Laden did nothing to stem the rise of the Islamic right since there are too many people who are part of it in too many places. Other people and even other groups have emerged and will continue to emerge.
Now I want to talk about the left’s reaction to this phenomenon. It is most peculiar since one would expect that the rise of anything so hostile to leftism would be detected instantly by some leftist somewhere, who would raise the alarm and alert all the others. Instead, the left has totally ignored the rise of the Islamic right. They don’t even seem aware of it and instead talk about extremists or radicals, but never fundamentalists or Islamo-fascists or the Islamic right. Or they will deny that certain people who are obviously Muslim (like members of ISIS) are Muslim. However, they are quite ready to denounce anyone on the right in the West as Islamophobic. For the left, the real problem is the rise of Islamophobia, but as I pointed out recently, this is like worrying about Germanophobia in the 1930s, when the real worry was the rise of the Nazi party. Of course, no one back in the 1930s seems to have worried about Germanophobia, but it is also true that the left was much less anti-Nazi back then than its current rhetoric would indicate. In fact, they seemed rather confused about the movement and what to do about it, and even made a pact with the Nazis in 1939. Well, at least the left back then had an excuse since Nazism and fascism were new movements, while conservative Islam goes back centuries, so leftists today have no excuse for not understanding what is happening. Then again, I have already argued that the left is suicidal (here), and that is something involving unconscious forces I know nothing about. Perhaps the frenzy over trivial things like pronouns is some kind of deep awareness on the left’s part that there is trouble ahead, trouble that can be avoided for now by focusing on ever more extreme trivialities.
But to get back to the term “Islamophobia,” the left’s use of it shows that they see no important division in the Muslim world between the left and the right. If you object to what the Islamic right is doing, the left will still call you an Islamophobe. That is quite astonishing, actually. The left actually supports the Islamic right. In fact, it supports it more than the Islamic left. For example, when the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud came out and denounced the Islamic world’s treatment of women, he wasn’t cheered by the feminist-saturated left, but was instead berated. See here. However, it seems very probable that a clash between the Islamic right and the left here in the West is in the left’s future. There are several scenarios possible. One is that the Islamic right simply fizzles as a movement before the left gets wind of it. Another is that as the Islamic right gets stronger and stronger here in the West, the left will simply get absorbed into it. That won’t mean that all the leftists will like this, but those who abandon the left will be called “Islamophobes” by those who remain, and their significance to the left will vanish. A third scenario is that enough leftists wake up to the danger that they manage to turn the entire left against the Islamic right. That will be a very abrupt turn, and while in the past I thought it might happen, it seems much less likely now. Too many leftist resources have been devoted to supporting the Islamic right, and there is no Stalin to force everyone else to make a change. Finally, it is possible that the left will lose its cultural dominance to the right – not the Islamic right, but our own right – and that the right will do enough to ensure that the Islamic right has no future in the West. At that point, what happens to the left in connection with the Islamic right will be of minor importance.
This brings us to the final point, which is what to do about the Islamic right. The current policy is a failure. That policy sees Muslims as benign and peaceful people who have grievances against us in the West because of our meddling in the Middle East. Such a policy does not even acknowledge the rise of the Islamic right, while at the same time its plan is to show that the West is friendly toward Muslims in the hope that the terrorist attacks will stop. It tries to show its friendliness to Muslims by allowing as much immigration of Muslims as possible and by allowing them to live their lives as they wish. Accordingly, when German women were groped on New Year’s Eve in Cologne over a year ago, the first official pronouncement from an authority (and keep in mind that the authorities had tried to cover up the phenomenon) was that women were going to have to make an adjustment in how they behaved at such gatherings by keeping men at arm’s length. Appeasement is the order of the day, and with a few exceptions (such as the issue of passengers carrying alcohol when taking taxis from the Minneapolis airport), our society seems to give in to every Muslim demand.
Yet, the grievance theory has severe problems. If the grievances are specified in a narrow manner, by limiting them to specific actions of America and its allies in the Middle East, then many terrorist attacks make no sense. The bombing of the gay nightclub in Orlando is one of these, as is the shooting of Malala, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and many others. None of the victims were connected in any way with America’s foreign policy. In fact, many victims were leftist. If, then, we allow for a broader notion of what counts as a grievance, the left is just as guilty as the right, and so apparently must be destroyed. Is this what the left is saying? Is this what it wants? Presumably not, though it is hard to tell since the left seems rather suicidal.
Another problem with the grievance theory is that lots of us have grievances. Some of us have grievances against Muslims. Buddhists are presumably angry about the destruction of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. Gays could be angry at all the gays who are executed by Muslims. It’s easy enough to imagine a secular gay organization that decides it has grievances against Muslims and conducts terrorist attacks against randomly-chosen mosques. If terrorism is about grievances, why isn’t this happening?
It is better to acknowledge a different reality. First, the terrorism comes from the Islamic right. A quick investigation of any of the terrorists shows that they never have any connection with anything leftist. They are not interested in promoting feminism or gay rights or anything tolerant. They are always steeped in conservative Islam. Moreover, while they occasionally make statements supporting the grievance theory, they also make statements indicating that imposing shari’a on all of us is their real aim.
Next, not only is the Islamic right rising, but the West is weakening. The West is weakening, of course, due to that cultural revolution known as the 1960s. Prior to that time, the West sent a message to the Muslim world: “Westernize! Become more Western like we are, and you’ll be much happier.” Today the message is: “We are guilty of sins against you. Therefore, you can do whatever you like to us.” The terrorism that is happening today would have been inconceivable in the 1950s. Strong measures would have been taken to deal with it, the vast majority of citizens would have either applauded those measures or made little squeaks of discontent, and that would have been the end of the matter. But since the 1960s, everything has changed, and strong measures cannot be tolerated. The slightest show of strength by a president will bring out huge numbers of protesters, though the most outrageous actions of ISIS somehow never bring out these same protesters (which is why I advocate calling them ISIS supporters). Accordingly, we in the West have become weaker, and terror happens when a ruling entity is weakening and not when it is strongest. For example, Czar Alexander II was assassinated, even though he had liberated Russia’s serfs. Similarly, the Shah of Iran was overthrown on the watch of Jimmy Carter, who was far more liberal than his predecessors had been. Accordingly, the left has it exactly backwards: it is not we (that is, ordinary people or those who vote Republican) who are at fault, but leftists themselves. They are the ones responsible for weakening the West, so they are the ones in the West who are responsible for terrorism.
The first step to ending the terrorism and stopping the rise of the Islamic right (at least stopping it here in the West) is for all to acknowledge that the grievance theory is wrong, to acknowledge that the Islamic right is rising, to acknowledge that Islam is turning in a direction that the vast majority of us find revolting, and to acknowledge that the Islamic right wants to impose that direction on all of us. Naturally, that last item brings guffaws from all the leftists, who think the idea that we could be conquered is crazy. But then the plan to conquer us is a century-long endeavor. In fact, it has been the plan ever since Islam first came along, so people who have waited centuries are content to wait for another century. In addition, all it would take to conquer us is for a generation to come along that is happy to be conquered, and from what I’ve gathered about what is being taught to young people these days, we are creating such a generation. They are taught to be kind to all Muslims and to think of the West as a terrible place, plus it is hard to imagine the special snowflakes winning any kind of armed conflict. So, we are on track to be conquered. Well, we can resist them now, when it’s easy, or fifty years from now, when it’s hard. Take your pick.
The next step is to stop all Muslim immigration. The third step is to give Muslims who are already here the choice of either assimilating or leaving. The fourth is to change our rhetoric, which currently is too anti-Western and too slanted toward cultural relativism. We need to emphasize the West’s strengths (such as freedom of religion and our willingness for self-criticism) and to acknowledge, that no matter how many warts we have, the vast majority of us do like living in the West and have no interest in living under shari’a. The slogans should be “The West is best” and “Say no to shari’a.” Our rhetoric is also way too Islamophilic. There is nothing racist or vile about being hostile to the Islamic right.
These seem like small steps, but right now they are politically almost impossible. (Or rather the first is impossible; if we can take that first step, the others may be easy.) Until the left is no longer dominant or until they wake up and abandon the grievance theory, we can expect the Islamic right to continue to gain power here in the West.
Excellent analysis!
Posted by: Maya M | 05/30/2017 at 10:24 AM
Thank you!
Posted by: John Pepple | 05/30/2017 at 12:17 PM