Europe’s Crisis of Faith
by Robert Bruce (September 2012)
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
The spectre of Islam is haunting Europe though in Britain etiquette dictates we couch this in terms of religious extremism. Needless to say, the threat posed to our settled liberties by Quaker fundamentalists is at the time of writing unspecified, and these leaden attempts to be even handed can also be glimpsed in the draconian strengthening of European traditions of laïcité to deal with what is transparently a problem of Muslim integration. Had the Muslim brotherhood not been exploiting the headscarf issue as part of an orchestrated attempt to undermine the principle of a secular public sphere and equality before the law, Jewish and Christian parents would not have needed to withdraw their children from state schools as the price for wearing a yarmulke or a crucifix in the classroom. These were once matters of supreme indifference even in highly secular states like France, and the furor over circumcision in Germany highlights the collateral damage which can ensue from the panicked assertion of secular values in the face of an Islamist threat.
This might seem a harsh and unnecessary digression but it is impossible to understand the European capitulation to Islamic extremism without grasping the extent of this atrophy of will and purpose. Europe finds it increasingly difficult to come up with ideas and no one articulated this poverty of vision better than the European Commission’s former President Romano Prodi in his underwhelming tribute to the EU’s architects.
The genius of the Founding Fathers lay in translating extremely high political ambitions into a series of more specific, highly technical questions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to co-operate in the economic sphere and then on to integration.
Prodi’s bland formulae encapsulates the European ‘genius’ for translating principles into technical questions, and when one reads such statements one is struck by how much it is Europe that lacks the spiritual antidote to the kind of mechanization of the soul, which Heidegger thought was the distinct culture destroying attribute of the USA and USSR, both states respectively wiping out higher impulses under the ‘desolate frenzy of technology’.1
As Europe’s identity has been so comprehensively bureaucratized, and the citizenship of its member states denuded of any substance, Europe’s governing elites remain curiously baffled that so many of its newer citizens feel only the most tenuous loyalty to a culture which demands so little. No advanced political science is required to understand this – Groucho Marx would have instantly spotted the dilemma, and as Europe loses its faith it is leaving little in the way of alternate spiritual visions to cleave to. In the modern world a shopworn tolerance will always be a weak competitor to the consolations of a great faith, and beneath the glibness of New Atheist fashion even the more sensitive Europeans are troubled by the one-sided contest. Matthias Politycki ‘s novel Lord of Horns, with its tale of a pale faced European overcoming his existential fatigue in an ecstatic voodoo cult in Cuba, reads as a particularly graphic metaphor for the European’s eloi –like effeteness in values, and Islam troubles Europeans so much precisely because it reminds them of this void. The studied Islamophilia of higher minds in such circumstances can only ever be fear and loathing masquerading as tolerance.
The embrace of Islam in such a culture, may be the ultimate postmodern leap: in a value lite antinomian culture conspicuous morality may constitute the ultimate transgression.
Its claims however, on the public square are infinitely more ambitious than those made by insipid middle class forays into the vapid slush of New Age spiritualism. They raise profound questions over its compatibility with the institutions of liberal democratic societies. Secularism, in, the accepted meaning of the term – the notion that church and state, the religious and the political are distinct realms which can and should be kept separate is a Christian idea which has never gained traction in the Islamic world. (Classical Arabic lacked even the vocabulary to express such an idea, a deficit belatedly overcome by Arab Christians supplying the necessary loan words.) Unlike Christianity whose experience as a persecuted faith and a later need to secure a movus vivendi between warring faiths forced it towards a demarcation of the spiritual and temporal realms, Islam was a conquering religion with no need for such self-denying ordinances. In place of the Christian distinction between canon and civil law there is only Sharia (literally: law) – an indivisible legal code of divine provenance regulating all spheres of social existence – tragically well attuned to the honour code of most Islamic societies where vengeance is not solely the prerogative of God.
Islamic militancy moreover has strong cultural cachet. If piety is a byword for primitivism amongst European professionals, it represents the height of urban sophistication for their counterparts in the Middle East where one could at times be forgiven for assuming engineering or science degree is an infallible predictor of Salafist tendencies. Anyone exchanging the traditional Sufism of his illiterate parents for the puritanism of the Muslim Brotherhood acquires a dignity and status which moderate folk religions can no longer provide. This is a strong social base by any measure, and it is not going to weaken any time soon.
In their earnest pursuit of a moderate Islam, moreover, western policy makers are simply playing to an extremist narrative. Islamists popularly rest their strength on being the total solution to all of man’s needs, and in order to avoid the clash of civilizations in which Salfists have invested so much capital, it might have been thought prudent to challenge the notion of unitary exclusive identities which underpins it. Western governments have opted however to pre-empt this question of loyalties by organizing Muslims into official religious-communal bodies and define Muslims exclusively through their religious identities, in the process neatly reversing that transition from status to contract which Henry Maine described as the master trend of modern society, and inaugurating what the German jurist Udo di Fabio has called a New Middle Ages, in which ‘the model is not the human individual but the harmonious ordering of groups’. Civil society has been weakened at a time when it needs to be strengthened. In the predictable corporate arrangements that grew out of this the ominous search for ‘community representatives’ it was pre-ordained that Islamists would gain a clean sweep, though it is remarkable how little confirmation the mainstream media gives to this blanket Islamisation. To take just a few representative examples, the American Council for American Islamic Relations, the Muslim Council of Britain (UK), the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UIOF) in France, the Commission Islamica in Spain, and the Executive Musselman in Belgium are all Muslim Brotherhood Fronts who have been accorded a determining role in ‘community engagement’ and policy planning.
Much of the impetus needless to say has come from the storm clouds of what in France at least has now officially been recognized as an intifada, a slow burn of communalist violence or the threat of it leading in the first instance to negotiation with ‘community leaders’ as an attempt to draw the sting of Islamist agitation, and ending by conceding the substance of their demands.
In France, Sarkozy’s highly choreographed tough talking notwithstanding, the most important long run effect of the former President’s handling of the banlieue riots has been the strengthening of the position of ‘basement Imams’ who have long aspired to usurp the authority of the French state in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, and have since been accorded unprecedented influence in return for a dampening of social unrest. This virtual abdication of the states monopoly on lawful coercion to the Muslim Brotherhood, elicited vehement protests from the Socialist Mayor of Nantes who accused Sarkozy of ‘promoting religious organisations to a role as mediators in the daily life of housing projects’. There is a remorseless logic to this concession to barbarism, which is given an added piquancy by France’s Vichy legacy, but it is in the UK, with its much vaunted counter-insurgency experience that this kind of amoral pragmatism most ostentatiously masquerades as statesmanship.
As the insipid cliché of the Northern Ireland peace process had it, if you’re not part of the problem you’re not part of the solution and just as the constitutionally minded Nationalists in Ulster were eclipsed by a terrorist political front, the Salafists have stolen a march on their moderate rivals in societies which prize peace as the ultimate value. Whilst Head of the Metropolitan Police’s Muslim Contact Unit, Bob Lambert, with his cultivation of hardline Salafist groups like the Muslim Association of Britain, typified the preference of securocrats for engaging with extremists who were thought plausibly enough to have more credibility with would be suicide bombers. One can understand the calculation though it is not without its risks – as the Metropolitan Police found when it belatedly realised its chief adviser, Mohamed Ali Harrath, was on an Interpol list for wanted terrorists, and Lambert himself, sailed pretty close to the wind. Though his ousting of Abu Hamza and al-Muhajiroun from their control of Finsbury Park mosque is endlessly trotted out as a vindication of this strategy, his King-making allies the MAB were simply another group of Qutbist Jew haters with documented links with Hamas. This is the grim harvest you reap when your mission is defined as combatting the methods by which extremism is consolidated rather than its substance, and it is a mark of how prevalent the Vichy syndrome is in Europe that so few find this logic sinister. Giving something peacefully before it is extracted violently used to be considered a shameful act of appeasement, but were it not for the serial episodes of misspeaking by officially endorsed Islamists, the British Government would have felt free to pile up these pyrrhic victories.
It is impossible to fault the sentiments, but they are as redundant as they are admirable. To the extent that Muslims like Majid are happy to receive everything as citizens and nothing as Muslims they are hardly an audience which needs reaching by a confessionally organized political body, and the very fact that the Quilliam Foundation still feels compelled to justify their support of democratic principles in theological terms simply emphasizes the primacy of Islam as the primary integrating loyalty. This is not that different in essence from Tariq Ramadan’s approach to securing Muslim loyalty to western societies, and it is probably no coincidence that Quiliam Foundation soon softened their liberal credentials – Ed Hussein for example betrays the same obsessive fixation with Israel and the Zionist entity of his apparent adversaries, and its self styled moderation has not deterred the Quilliam Foundation from forging close links with the Council on American Islamic Relations whose positions are indistinguishable from its British Muslim Brotherhood sibling the MCB. In his conflicted riposte to Lambert, Maajid nevertheless raises a question of ultimate loyalties and the answer cannot be postponed indefinitely.
[2] To take a typical example the works of Omar Kayamm are either banned or shunned as blasphemous in much of the Islamic world, and were becoming haram even in the eighteenth century. That we have knowledge of beautiful works such as The Rubáiyát is largely due to Orientalists like William Jones who saved these treasures from a Wahhabi driven puritanism that was transforming Islam in the Indian subcontinent.
[3] An obvious example – the very notion of an Islamic state and laws covering a territorial state would have been inconceivable to ancient jurists. Similarly the Qutbist notion that the world can be purified by spectacular acts of violence owes more to 19th century anarchist and nihilist traditions than traditional Islam.
[4] A telling example of this homogenization of faith on a Saudi template is the ubiquity of the veil in countries where it has zero cultural antecedents and a politicization of this issue to carve out a separate public sphere in western societies where the manifestation of religious identity in public institutions is frowned upon when not expressly prohibited.
[5] Despite overwhelming opposition to the Gulf and Afghan war, there is nevertheless in Britain, a kind of sickly sentimentality about our boys in uniform, which is mainifested in a ‘Dianesque’ recreational grieving at military funeral processions. The thought that supporting the wars might honour their sacrifices of these brave young men is clearly lost on them. This is collective self-indulgence not patriotism. [6] The corruption of the British higher education system by Saudi and other Salafist sources of funding is a depressing subject covered exhaustively in the Centre for Social Cohesion’s Report A Degree of Influence.
The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
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