by Mark Steyn
After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, William Tayler wrote:
With the Soonnees the Wahabees are on terms of tolerable agreement, though differing on certain points, but from the Sheahs, they differ radically, and their hatred, like all religious hatred, is bitter and intolerant. But the most striking characteristic of the Wahabee sect, and that which principally concerns this narrative, is the entire subservience which they yield to the Peer, or spiritual guide.
Mr. Tayler, a minor civil servant in Bengal, was a genuine “multiculturalist.” Although he regarded his own culture as superior, he was engaged enough by the ways of others to study the differences between them. By contrast, contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them. After all, if it’s grossly judgmental to say one culture’s better than another, why bother learning about the differences? “Celebrate diversity” with a uniformity of ignorance. Had William Tayler been around when the Islamification of the West got under way and you’d said to him there was a mosque opening down the street, he’d have wanted to know: What kind of mosque? Who’s the imam? What branch of Islam? Old-school imperialists could never get away with the feel-good condescension of PC progressives.
Here’s Tayler again: “The tenets originally professed by the Wahabees have been described as a Mahomedan Puritanism joined to a Bedouin Phylarchy, in which the great chief is both the political and religious leader of the nation.”
Too right. In 1946, Colonel William Eddy, the first United States minister to Saudi Arabia, was told by the country’s founder, Ibn Saud, “We will use your iron, but you will leave our faith alone.”
Had William Tayler been on hand, he might have questioned whether that was such a great deal. American “iron”—money and technology invested in the oil industry—transformed Saudi Arabia’s financial fortunes while leaving its faith and everything else alone. In 1974, the oil industry accounted for 91 percent of Saudi exports. In 2000, it accounted for 91.4 percent. Two trillion dollars poured into the House of Saud’s treasury, and what did they do with it? Diversify the economy? Launch new industries? Open up the tourism sector? Not a thing. The country remained the same desert, literally and psychologically, it was a quarter century earlier. So where did all that money go? From the seventies onward, Saudi Arabia used their Yanqui dollars to export their faith even more widely than the oil. Instead of diversifying their industrial exports, they honed their ideological one, financing Islamic centers, mosques, and schools in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Bosnia, Nigeria, Britain, and America. In 2005, a twenty-three-year-old American citizen named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was charged with plotting to assassinate the president. Like that photograph of Lincoln and Booth, Mr. Abu Ali was closer than you might think: according to the Associated Press report in the New York Times, he “was born in Houston and moved to Falls Church, Va., where he was valedictorian of his high school class.”
High school valedictorian from northern Virginia, huh? Was he in that year’s production of Bye Bye Birdie? Not exactly. Neither the Times nor the AP had space to mention that the typical Virginia high school Mr. Abu Ali attended was the Islamic Saudi Academy, funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It’s on American soil but it describes itself as “subject to the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” and its classes are based on “the curriculum, syllabus, and materials established by the Saudi Ministry of Education.” So what does it teach? No room for American history, but that’s not so unusual in Virginia high schools these days. Instead, the school concentrates on Wahhabi history and “Islamic values and the Arabic language and culture,” plus “the superiority of jihad.” By the eleventh grade, students are taught that on the Day of Judgment Muslims will fight and kill the Jews, who will find that the very trees they’re hiding behind will betray them by saying, “Oh Muslim, oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him.” Beats climate change and gay outreach, or whatever they do in the regular Falls Church high school.
Here is a standard Saudi Ministry of Education exercise, as taught in the first grade at that Virginia academy and at other Saudi-funded schools in the Western world:
Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words:
Every religion other than ______________ is false.
Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________.
Correct answers: Islam, hellfire.
And what do America’s president and the secretary of state and the deputy secretary of this and the undersecretary of that say in return?
The Saudis are our _______.
Fiends? Whoops, sorry, friends. The Saudis are our friends. No matter how many of us they kill.
The Germans and Japanese had to make do with Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose. If only they could have had Third Reich Academies in every English city and Hirohito Highs from Alaska to Florida and St. Adolf’s Parish Church in every medium-sized town around the world. Of all the many examples of how our multiculti mainstream ushers the extremists from the dark fringe to the center of Western life, there is no more emblematic tale than a famous 2004 court victory won by an adolescent schoolgirl called Shabina Begum. Had the verdict not been overturned on appeal in 2006, all British schools would have had to permit students to wear the full “jilbab”—Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. This triumph over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both Cherie Booth, the wife of Tony Blair, and of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that advocates violence in support of a worldwide caliphate and which (according to the BBC) “urges Muslims to kill Jewish people.” What does an “extremist” have to do to be too extreme for the wife of the British prime minister?
Ms. Booth hailed her initial court win as “a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry.” It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of young Shabina Begum’s Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Is it “bigoted” to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it “prejudiced” to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain?
Nor, incidentally, was Miss Begum “preserving” any identity: she’s of Bangladeshi origin, and her belated adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabization of South Asian (and African and European and North American) Islam that’s at the root of so many current problems. Even as an honored Arab tradition, it dates all the way back to the seventies. Not the 1070s or 1570s but the 1970s. There is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. It is no more ancient and traditional than platform shoes, bell bottoms, and cheesecloth shirts. It’s no more part of Shabina Begum’s inherited identity than my little boy dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it’s not dissimilar. So it’s a wholly invented and consciously chosen identity. It’s not part of her Bangladeshi heritage, it’s not part of British custom. It is equally alien in both the Indian subcontinent and the British Isles, and its appearance in both places is, in point of fact, political rather than spiritual: it’s part of a movement explicitly hostile to what Tony Blair calls “our way of life.” If it’s too unreasonable to expect young Shabina Begum to choose a British identity, couldn’t Mr. and Mrs. Blair at least encourage her to preserve her authentic Bangladeshi one?
During the cartoon jihad, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto spelled it out: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”
Or as Kofi Annan framed it, rather more soothingly, “The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.”
If you’ve also “recently acquired�
� a significant Muslim population and you’re not sure how to “adjust” to it, well, here’s the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated with the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate with the immigrants. But it goes beyond that—because the immigrant populations themselves are adjusting, developing an Islamic identity far more intense than anything practiced by their forbears. Take Nada Farooq, a student at Meadowvale Secondary School in Mississauga, Ontario. In 2004 she started an Internet forum for Muslim teens in the area. One poster thought it would be fun if they had a thread explaining what made Canada unique, but Nada nixed that one in nothing flat: “Who cares? We hate Canada.”
So what does grab her interest? Well, she wasn’t too thrilled to hear that Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, a Hamas honcho, had been killed by an Israeli missile. “May Allah crush these jews,” she declared, “bring them down to their knees, humiliate them. Ya Allah make their women widows and their children orphans.” But she and her fellow Meadowvale students were extremely partial to a very bloody video showing the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq.
Oh, well. Excitable teens often pass through a somewhat turbulent phase. But two years later Miss Farooq’s husband and sixteen other men were arrested in a terrorist plot that included wide-ranging plans to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange, seize Parliament in Ottawa, and kidnap and behead the prime minister.
I’m often damned as a “self-loathing Canadian” because I’m opposed to socialized health care and government-funded multiculturalism and whatnot. But in the self-loathing stakes I’ve got nothing on Nada Farooq. “We hate Canada.” Yet no one calls her a self-loathing Canadian. Perhaps that’s because she’s not a gal you’d want to tangle with; when she married, she gave serious thought to getting a prenup that would dissolve the union if her husband failed to partake in jihad. Or perhaps it’s because, at heart, no one expects her to feel “Canadian,” whatever that means these days. Miss Farooq’s father is a pharmacist who fills prescriptions at a military base in Wainwright, Alberta, and says he supports the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry on their mission in Afghanistan. After the terror cell was cracked, Mohammed Umer Farooq told the press that his daughter’s views—hating Canada, in favor of shipping homosexuals to Saudi Arabia to be executed or crushed, etc.—were new to him, but that she’s always been “more religious” than he is. He described her as “100 percent religious” and himself as “30 percent religious.”
Nada Farooq is typical of a significant minority of young Muslims: raised in the West by “moderate Muslim” parents, she is, unlike them, ferociously Muslim, Islamist, jihadist. Her father’s generation brought to the West the Indian subcontinent’s traditional moderate Sufi Islam. In Pakistan, Britain, and Canada, that Sufism is yielding to a hard-line strain of Deobandi Islam—essentially a local subsidiary of Wahhabism. Unlike her parents, Nada Farooq has no natural Pakistani identity and she rejects her thin, reedy multicultural Canadian identity, choosing instead a pan-Islamic consciousness that transcends nationality: she planned to name her son Khattab, after the Chechen mujahadeen commander killed in 2002. Growing up in a Toronto suburb, she found recent Chechen history more inspiring than Canadian history, assuming she was taught any.
How many Nada Farooqs are there? On the first anniversary of the July 7, 2005, Tube bombings, the Times of London commissioned a poll of British Muslims. Among the findings:
16 percent say that while the attacks may have been wrong, the cause was right.
13 percent think that the four men who carried out the bombings should be regarded as “martyrs.”
7 percent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in the United Kingdom can be justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 percent for a military target.
2 percent would be proud if a family member decided to join al Qaeda. 16 percent would be “indifferent.”
If this is a war, then that is a substantial fifth column. There are, officially, one million Muslims in London, half of them under twenty-five. If 7 percent think suicide attacks on civilians are justified, that’s 70,000 potential supporters in Britain’s capital city. Most of them will never bomb a bus or even provide shelter or a bank account to someone who does. But some of them will. As September 11 demonstrated, you only have to find nineteen stout-hearted men, and from a talent pool of 70,000 that’s not bad odds.
Besides, a large majority of Western Muslims support almost all the terrorists’ strategic goals: according to one poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. Another poll places the percentage favoring “hard-line” sharia at a mere 40 percent. So there’s one definition of a “moderate Muslim”: he’s a Muslim who wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he’s a “moderate” because he can’t be bothered flying a plane into a skyscraper to get it. Another poll found that 20 percent of British Muslims sympathized with the “feelings and motives” of the July 7 London Tube bombers. Or, more accurately, 20 percent were prepared to admit to a pollster they felt sympathy, which suggests the real figure might be somewhat higher. Huge numbers of Muslims—many of them British subjects born and bred—see their fellow Britons blown apart on trains and buses and are willing to rationalize the actions of the mass murderers.
The Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists—even though both share the same aims. In fact, sharing the same aims as the terrorists is what gives the Islamic lobby groups their credibility. If there were a “moderate Muslim” lobby—one that, say, believed that suicide bombing is always wrong, even against Israelis, or that supported the liberation of Iraq on the grounds that the Iraqi people are in favor of it—your average Western government would immediately be suspicious that such a group was not “authentically” Muslim. Whereas, if you oppose the occupation of Iraq and seek to justify the depravity of Hamas, you have instant credibility. And so government ministers in Western nations spend most of their time taking advice on the jihad from men who agree with its aims. You can pluck out news items at random: in London, a religious “hate crimes” law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ottawa, a government report that recommends legalizing polygamy; in Seattle, the introduction of gender-separate Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools…. The September 11 terrorists were in favor of all these ends. The disagreement is only on the means.
A while back, I found myself behind a car in Vermont that had a one-word bumper sticker containing the injunction “CO-EXIST.” It’s one of those sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority, part of the multiculti mood music that makes lefty pieties one long soothing express elevator to cloud-cuckoo land. On this “CO-EXIST” sticker, the “C” was the Islamic crescent, the “O” was the hippy peace sign, the “X” was the Star of David and the “T” was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is that it’s the first of those symbols that has a problem with “co-existence.” Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all. Indeed, co-existence is what the Islamists are at war with—or, if you prefer, pluralism; the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighborhood. And even those who nominally respect the idea tend, on closer examination, to mean by “pluralism” something closer to “subjugation.” Take one of those famous “moderate Muslims”: Imam Zaid Shakir, the subject of a flattering profile in the New York Times under the headline “U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground.” Good for them, but what does a “modern middle ground” mean? As Imam Shakir—who grew up as Ricky Mitchell in Georgia and Connecticut—says, “Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country. I think it would help people, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a Muslim.”
I think he’s right when
he says honest Muslims want America to be a Muslim country. But they don’t mean it in quite the same sense Christians do when they speak of America as a Christian country. By a “Muslim country,” they don’t just foresee a country with a majority of Muslim inhabitants but a country whose civil institutions are Muslim.
The Islamists incite jihad from American, Canadian, British, European, and Australian mosques, and they get away with it. The West’s elites lapse reflexively into twittering over insufficient “respect” and entirely fictional outbreaks of “Islamophobia.” The Mounties, the FBI, Scotland Yard, and others are reasonably efficient at breaking up cells and plots, but they’re the symptoms, not the disease. It’s the ideological pipeline that needs to be dismantled. Through their network of schools and mosques, the Saudis are attempting to make themselves into a Muslim Vatican—if not infallible, at any rate the most authoritative voice in the Islamic world. We might have responded to the Wahhabist challenge by distinguishing, as William Tayler did, between Sunni and Shia, Sufi and Salafi, and all the rest, and attempting to exploit the divisions. But, as proper Western multiculturalists, we celebrate diversity by lumping them all together as “Islam.”
So if the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As Fascism and Communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world’s grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency—not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the toxic strain of Wahhabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalizing force of our time. If the implausible mantra of Western politicians that Islam is a “religion of peace” had any strategic value against the head hackers and suicide bombers, it would be as a prelude to pointing out that, sadly, Wahhabism is an exception to this otherwise saintly character, that Wahhabism is a religion of pieces. But our lack of curiosity about which particular school of imam is setting up shop on Main Street is greatly facilitating the cause of pan-Islamism, a much better example of globalization than McDonald’s. In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it’s put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office in Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of anti-trust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom n’ pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis’ Burqa King version of global homogeneity.
