by Mark Steyn
And even if you’re truly a “moderate” Muslim, why should you be expected to take on the most powerful men in Islam when the West’s media and political class merely pander to them? What kind of support does the culture give to those who speak out against the Islamists? The Iranians declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie and he had to go into hiding for more than a decade while his government and others continued fawning on the regime that issued the death sentence. The Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh spoke out and was murdered, and the poseur dissenters of Hollywood were too busy congratulating themselves on their courage and bravery in standing up to Bush even to mention their poor dead colleague in the weepy Oscar montage of the year’s deceased. To speak out against the Islamists means to live in hiding and under armed security in the heart of the so-called “free world.”
Meanwhile, Yale offers a place on its campus to a former ambassador-at-large for the murderous Taliban regime.
When you look at the syncretist forms of Islam that endured for many years in Mecca’s remoter outposts—from the Balkans to Central Asia to Indonesia—they derived their “moderate” nature not from any particular school of Islam itself but from the character of the surrounding culture; Soviet regimes, a Chinese mercantile class, European imperialism all successfully tempered the more extreme forms of Islam. It’s no surprise that, with the loss of Western confidence, the free world’s Muslim populations are growing more radical with each generation.
So within the ever larger Muslim population is an ever larger Western Muslim population and within that ever larger Western Muslim population is an ever more radicalized Western Muslim population. And when you penetrate through all the various layers, there is a very profound challenge at the heart of the Islamic question. It was embodied by Abdul Rahman, a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he had committed the crime of converting to Christianity. “We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die,” said Abdul Raoulf of the nation’s principal Muslim body, the Afghan Ulama Council. “Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there’s nothing left.” Needless to say, Imam Raoulf is one of Afghanistan’s leading “moderate” clerics. “Even if the government does not sentence him to death, then the people of Afghanistan will kill him,” declared Maulavi Enayatullah Baligh, a lecturer in Islamic “law” at Kabul University, but evidently one who likes to take his work home with him and practice it ad hoc with the local lynch mob.
Eventually, after a word in Hamid Karzai’s ear from various Western prime ministers and Condi Rice and Co., the issue was finessed through back channels and poor Mr. Rahman was bundled onto a plane out of Kabul and dropped off in Rome. But Condi and Co. won’t be there for every Abdul Rahman, and so the question at the heart of his struggle remains unresolved: if Nazra Quraishi, quoted above, is correct that one “can embrace Islam but cannot get out,” that Islam is a religion one can only convert to, not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. It cuts to the heart of what the multicultural state is, or believes itself to be. “Radical Islamism,” wrote Fouad Ajami, “has come to mock the very principle of nationality and citizenship.”
But is that really so hard to do? Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch, and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking. Alleged “conservatives” like the former prime minister Joe Clark spoke favorably of Canada being a “nation of nations,” meaning Indian nations, Inuit nations, the Quebec nation, the Ukrainian-Canadian nation, etc., with nary a thought for what other forces might set up shop in such a wasteland of a concept. The jihad is a functioning version of everything the multicultists have promoted for years. The Left talked up sappy Benettonad one-worldism, while the pan-Islamists got on with their own particular strain of one-worldism—strong, unyielding, and slipping across borders with ease.
Anjem Choudary, a thirty-nine-year-old British Muslim leader, hailed September 11 as “magnificent” and its perpetrators “heroes”; he mocked the victims of the London Tube bombings, calls on Muslims to refuse to cooperate with the British police, and advocates sharia for the United Kingdom. He and his wife are welfare recipients, but nevertheless he’s able to rack up impressive frequent-flyer mileage jetting off to liaise with like-minded Muslims in other countries. On the BBC, he was asked why he didn’t simply move to a state that already has sharia. “Who says you own Britain, anyway?” he replied. “Britain belongs to Allah. The whole world belongs to Allah.” Warming to his theme, he added, “If I go to the jungle, I’m not going to live like the animals, I’m going to propagate a superior way of life. Islam is a superior way of life.”
But Britain is a jungle of declawed lions, its leadership divided between outright appeasers and dismal fatalists. And those who call for a Muslim Reformation in the spirit of the Christian Reformation ignore the obvious flaw in the analogy—that Muslims have the advantage of knowing (unlike Luther and Calvin) where reform in Europe ultimately led: the banishment of God to the margins of society.
Muslims are less likely to fall for that than to exploit the obvious opportunities it presents. What will be the next phase of the Islamist advance in the West? If you’re a teenager in most European cities these days, you’ve a choice between two competing identities—a robust confident Islamic identity or a tentative post-nationalist cringingly apologetic European identity. It would be a mistake to assume the former is attractive only to Arabs and North Africans.
THE POST-CHRISTIAN WEST
In the run-up to Christmas not so long ago, I was in a store in Vermont buying a last-minute gift when the owner’s twenty-something daughter walked in. “Thanks for the sweater, Mom,” she said. “Kevin really liked his present too.”
“But it’s only the twenty-third,” said the bewildered lady.
“Mom,” sighed the kid, wearily. “How many times do I have to tell you? We always open our presents on the solstice.”
A couple of weeks later, a neighbor of mine in New Hampshire got married. He’s a biker and a tattooist, and he’s deeply spiritual. So he and his bride were married in the middle of a field in a service filled with imprecations to Odin, Thor, and sundry other Norse gods. The congregation of bikers rolled their eyes, which may or may not be a traditional Norse mark of respect.
It is, indeed, the case that when men cease to believe in God they’ll believe in anything. But the anything they’ll believe in is at least in part environmentally determined. In 2006, Alice Thomson of the Daily Telegraph was granted an interview with the Dalai Lama at Dharmsala, in northern India, where he lives in exile. En route to his pad, she encountered both a native Tibetan bearing the brutal marks of Chinese torture and, at one of the luxury hotels that have sprung up for moneyed pilgrims, a “rotund Austrian biscuit heiress” who turned to Buddhism after her stomach staple failed to take. Not all my North Country neighbors can afford air tickets and a suite in Dharmsala. So, given those constraints, solstice worship and Norse deities seem a reasonable fit with the landscape of northern New England. But they’d be a tougher sell in, say, Glasgow or Rotterdam. So what would work in the densely populated parts of Western Europe? At the risk of piling too many doomsday scenarios atop one another, it’s worth noting that throughout the Western world Islam is advancing not just by outbreeding but also by conversion.
Herbert Asquith is not the most famous British prime minister to American ears, but he’s the one who took his country into the Great War, which is the one that ended the Caliphate and delivered the Arab world into British hands. His great-granddaughter, Emma Clark, is now a Muslim. She’s a landscape artist and has designed an “Islamic garden” at the home of the Prince of Wales. The Honorable Jonathan Birt, son of Lord Birt, the former director-general of the BBC, is also a Muslim and is known as Yahya Birt. The Earl of Yarborough is a Muslim, and goes by the name Abdul Mateen, though whether he can get served in the House of Lords tea room under that moniker is unclear.
The above “reverts”—as Islam calls
converts (as they see it, everyone is born a Muslim, it’s just that some of us don’t know it yet)—are not merely the Muslim equivalents of the Richard Gere Buddhists and Tom Cruise Scientologists but the vanguard of something bigger. As English and Belgian and Scandinavian cities Islamify, their inhabitants will face a choice between living as a minority and joining the majority. Many will opt for the latter. At the very minimum, Islam will meet the same test as the hippy-dippy solstice worship does in Vermont: it will seem environmentally appropriate. For many young men, it already provides the sense of identity that the happy-face nothingness of multiculturalism declines to offer. In Britain, a white supremacist neo-Nazi whose writings inspired a 1999 Soho nail bombing that killed three people has since converted to Islam. David Myatt, a founder of the British National Socialist Movement, is now Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt. Formerly opposed to non-white immigration into the United Kingdom, he now says that “the pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognizes practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonor, the arrogance, the materialism of the West…. For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.” It’s hard to imagine him ever changing back, and not just because he’s on record as supporting the killing of those who leave Islam: a lot of his fellow “white supremacists” will find it’s not the “white” but the “supremacist” bit they really like. Islam already has a certain cachet: another revert, Omar Brooks, marked the first anniversary of the Tube bombings by doing some Islamostand-up at the Small Heath Youth and Community Centre in Birmingham. As the Times of London reported: “At one point he announces dramatically that the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center ‘changed many people’s lives.’ After a pause, he brings the house down by adding: ‘Especially those inside.’”
He didn’t literally bring the house down. He leaves that to Mohammed Atta. Nonetheless, even an Islamist lounge act is doing his part to provide a bigger pool for the jihadists to swim in.
In 2005, a reader in Asia sent me an e-mail link: “Canadian Converts to Islam Being Recruited by al Qaeda.” It was from the Press Trust of India. If it appeared in any Canadian paper, I didn’t see it. But lo and behold, a year later there were “Canadian converts to Islam” among the seventeen Torontonians arrested for plotting to blow up the Stock Exchange. They’re not the only reverts in the news in the post–September 11 period:
The Miami cell plotting to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago
The shoe-bomber, Richard Reid
The July 7 London Tube bomber, Germaine Lindsay
The Washington sniper, John Allen Muhammad
The Belgian lady Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up in a suicide attack on U.S. troops in Baghdad
The Australian factory worker Jack Roche, sentenced in Perth for plotting to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra
The founder and members of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a Filipino Muslim group believed to be responsible for a ferry bombing that killed more than a hundred people in 2004
Abdul Wahid, born Don Stewart-Whyte, son of a British Conservative Party official, half-brother of a top model, and former brother-in-law of French tennis star Yannick Noah, who was arrested in August 2006 for planning to blow himself up on a flight from Heathrow to New York
And on, and on. It would seem obvious that the use of reverts is a conscious strategy. The only question I have about that Press Trust of India headline—“Canadian Converts to Islam Being Recruited by al Qaeda”—is the implication that their Muslim conversion predates and is separate from their jihadist recruitment. It’s more likely that the two processes are simultaneous—that they are converted precisely in order to be jihadists. That’s just plain operational good sense: the most gung-ho Pushtun yakherd may be hot for martyrdom but he’s going to stand out at the U.S. Air check-in in a way that a third-generation Canadian Muslim isn’t or—better yet—a revert of non-Arab appearance and a name that isn’t going to set off any flags in the computer—“Steven Chand,” “Richard Reid,” “Jack Roche.” By some accounts, 80 percent of the imams in Canadian mosques are said to be “extreme.” So what kind of converts would they be looking for, and what kind would be likely to respond to their rhetoric?
In 2002, I asked a Muslim in Paris why Islam was the fastest-growing religion in the West. He said four out of five converts in Europe were women, positing therefrom that, aside from spousal conversions, significant numbers of Western females found the feminist notion of womanhood degrading and unworthy. Whether or not that’s true, I was startled in successive weeks to hear from Dutch and English acquaintances that they’ve begun going out “covered.” The Dutch lady lives in a rough part of Amsterdam and says when you’re on the street in Islamic garb, the Muslim men smile at you respectfully instead of jeering at you as an infidel whore. The English lady lives in a swank part of London but says pretty much the same thing. Both felt there was not just a physical but a psychological security in being dressed Muslim. They’re not “reverts,” but, at least for the purposes of padding the public space, they’re passing for Muslim. And as more of the public space becomes Muslim it will seem more and more comfortable to do that.
How quickly will that happen? In late 2005, the Observer ran the following story: “Olympic Costs Set to Double: Londoners Face Huge Tax Rise.”
Oh, come on. Only double? Surely you can do better than that. Well, it was early days for 2012 Olympic overspend, and proud Britons were no doubt certain that by the time the Queen opens the Games there’ll be a few more zeroes added to their tax bills. Meanwhile, the same week as that Observer story, Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary group, announced plans to build a mosque in the East End—right next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people—only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral). Tablighi Jamaat plans to raise the necessary £100 million through donations from Britain and “abroad.”
And I’ll bet they do. Tablighi Jamaat is an openly Islamist organization of global reach and, according to the FBI, an al Qaeda recruiting front for terrorists. But, watching these two construction projects go up side by side in Newham, I don’t think there’ll be any doubt which has the tighter grip on fiscal sanity. A tax bill or two down the line and Londoners may be wishing they could subcontract the entire Olympics to Tablighi Jamaat.
No doubt it would have been heartening if the archbishop of Canterbury had announced plans to mark the 2012 Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practicing or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews. Whatever one feels about it, the London Markaz will be a more accurate symbol of Britain in 2012 than Her Majesty pulling up next door with the Household Cavalry.
THE POTEMKIN CHURCH
The Saddam Apology is not a joke, by the way. In 2005, a “working group” of Anglican bishops produced a 101-page document called (with no discernible sense of irony) Countering Terrorism. Its central proposal was that Western Christians should show “institutional repentance” for the Iraq war by having their bishops and cardinals make a formal apology for the wrong they did at a gathering of “mainly Muslim” leaders. Aside from its comedic value, the mooted prostration would in itself have provided confirmation to Muslims of the widespread belief that Christianity has embarked on a new Crusade: why would these bishops be apologizing for the war if they weren’t the ones who’d launched it?
If only. The last thing any Muslim needs to worry about is an Anglican bishop coming after him. The bishop of Lichfield, at Evensong, on t
he night of the London Tube bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants that “just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths.” Father Paul Hawkins of St. Pancras parish church, a few hundred yards from the scene of the atrocities, told his own congregation that Sunday, “There are no Muslim terrorists. There are terrorists.”
It’s not the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the meta-message it conveys: we’re the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we’ll apologize to you. Even in America, the interim pastor at my local church in New Hampshire on the Sunday morning of September 16, 2001, was principally concerned to warn us not to attack any Muslims, even though in that notably undiverse corner of America finding any Muslims to attack would have involved a three-hour drive. That’s why the Church of England and the Episcopal Church and the Congregational Church and the United Church of Canada and many others are sinking beneath the bog of their own relativist mush, while Islam is the West’s fastest-growing religion. There’s no market for a faith that has no faith in itself.
One reason why the developed world has a difficult job grappling with the Islamist threat is that it doesn’t take religion seriously. It condescends to it. In Europe’s wholly secularized environment, the enduring religiosity of America is not just odd, but primitive. It puts Americans in the same category as remote tribes in Africa or cargo culters in the Pacific—anthropologically fascinating, but nonetheless backward. Hence, British novelist Martin Amis on the eve of the Iraq war:
One of the exhibits at the Umm Al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein’s own blood (he donated twenty-four litres over three years). Yet this is merely the most spectacular of Saddam’s periodic sops to the mullahs. He is, in reality, a career-long secularist—indeed an “infidel,” according to bin Laden. Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in the blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive. We hear about the successful “Texanisation” of the Republican Party. And doesn’t Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?
