“…….I have put the word emerge in bold because I think that Islamic movements as we see them today in places like Belgium will end up purging those who joined them and become autonomous. Obviously…….”
Absolutely agree.
Islam and the Left initially cooperate because they share separate but operationally compatible Globalist visions, expressed in doctrinal terms.
Unfortunately, when access to the levers of power have been obtained through such a cooperation Sharia will supervene and the ideological niceties of the Left will be eliminated, along with the membership.
In the UK the Labour Party is feeling the harsh reality of this process as having served their purpose the Moslem block vote is being moved to the next bunch of ‘useful idiots’, the Green Party.
This also ties in with the Author’s perception that Global rather that domestic issues will in future drive political discourse. The fact Moslem MP’s were elected to the British Parliament at the last general election on a Gaza ticket seems to confirm that view.
You speak to a fundamental problem: understanding the peculiar, subterranean doctrines that inform media and elite views. Partisans adopt a language unfamiliar to middle class Americans, and bludgeon us with subversive concepts difficult to grasp. It is a language of denunciation and repudiation that is so new, and so contrary to common values, that we fail to grasp what is happening. Please keep excavating and explaining it.
“The ideal of the open society doesn’t simply ignore reality, it gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those who are able to maintain it.”
I think this is exactly right. The idea is so foreign to most average Americans that you hear Decolonize and you might not understand exactly what someone means by that. It's broadly accepted in American and western thought that colonization was evil and destructive to all those subjected to it. Of course the real history is much more complex and nuanced but what matters is the perception. So they build off of a false but widely accepted perception and push a they use it to push a suicidal grievance ideology that will ultimately destroy western civilization if it's adopted.
Yep. Throw in math and science are white, along with grading, honors and AP classes, “all lives matter” is a blatantly racist statement, Oct 7 atrocities were fair resistance, and boys/ men who say they are girls/women really are, and can use women’s rest rooms and compete in girls/women’s sports - etc - so many words and phrases are coded bigotry. It’s gotten to where people just remain silent rather than say anything. Wait, was that the point?
Thank you, you are an execptional scholar! Coming yourself from a Third-World country, you understand so many phenomenoms mosly ignored by Amercan (for instance the "intellectual' connection between Obama and Frantz Fanon!l)
You nailed it. For US domestic purposes, I think we need to make clear that these are anti-American forces we are encountering, on the far left and the far right. That is the best way to activate the moderate middle to reject the illiberal fringes.
Excellent and very well-written article, Zineb! I am really glad to see that there are more and more people like you who are calling out this Third-Worldist ideology and raising awareness about the Kremlin, Tehran, the CCP, and numerous non-state actors’ roles in perpetuating these malevolent narratives and propaganda points. Keep doing great work!
In my opinion, you are really trying to understand what has happened over the past forty years, what that has led to, what the consequences for the future are, and you dare to write about it. Consider that a great compliment! Samuel Huntington writes about the clash of civilizations. I think that the Islamic world, with its theocratic vision, and the Western Christian world clash because in the Christian Western world, God and man are equal to one another. We have separated church and state. In the Islamic world, God stands above everything and man is nothing. You say it yourself with 'Islamism in its doctrinal core demands a fully ordered society ruled by religious law — Sharia'. Perhaps I am being a bit too black and white, hmm... but still.
Added to this is the fact that in Western Christian culture, driven by its convictions, the idea has taken hold over the past fifty years that it must permanently atone for what its forefathers did in the past against – or, if you will, in – that Third World. Although many people in the West no longer adhere to the Christian faith, in my opinion, it is still deeply rooted in Western culture. In other words, Christian dogmas have been replaced by other dogmas. From the perspective of Western Christian culture, you have to believe in something, after all. Let it be the climate problem, or that we must help the whole world, or whatever else instead of ourselves.
Why Should Non-Muslims Try to Understand Islam? Because It Does Not Wait For You To Decide.
I want to tell you something that almost nobody in a position to say it publicly will say plainly.
Not because it is controversial among people who have actually read the texts. It is not. It is so well established that the tradition's own greatest scholars said it first, said it clearly, and built a legal architecture around it that has been standing for over a thousand years.
They just don't say it on CNN.
Here it is.
Islam is the only major religion on earth whose authoritative legal tradition contains a framework for governing people who never chose it.
Not a fringe interpretation. Not a radical deviation. The mainstream position of classical Sunni jurisprudence. Ibn Kathir said it. Al-Suyuti said it. Al-Shafi'i said it. These are not angry men on the internet. These are the tradition's own most revered voices, the ones whose opinions still govern Islamic law today, and what they said is this: the world is divided into the house of Islam and the house of war, and the legal obligation to bring the second into the first does not expire, does not pause, and does not require your permission.
Every other major religion exists to transform the lives of people who walk through the door voluntarily. Islam does that too. But Islam also contains something none of the others do. A legal obligation toward the people who never walked through the door. And a specified set of conditions under which those people may be permitted to keep living. Under Islamic authority. Paying a tax for the privilege. Subject to restrictions. Subject to a formal, legally codified ritual of humiliation.
This is not a secret buried in a dusty manuscript. This is the tradition's own self-description. And it is sitting there in the sources, in plain Arabic, waiting for anyone willing to read it.
This is why Shariah law does not stay in Muslim-majority countries. It was never designed to.
Now. The other thing you need to understand is abrogation.
The Quran has peaceful verses. Tolerance, coexistence, patience. It also has verses commanding perpetual warfare against unbelievers until Islam is the last thing standing. If you are expecting me to tell you these two things somehow harmonize, I am going to disappoint you.
The Islamic legal tradition has a formal mechanism for resolving this problem. It is called naskh. We say abrogation. Think of it as a software update. The most recent instruction overrides everything before it. The Quran was not delivered all at once. It came over roughly twenty-three years, piece by piece, and in Islamic jurisprudence the later material governs the earlier material when they conflict.
Al-Suyuti. One of the tradition's greatest scholars. Counted more than one hundred peaceful verses cancelled out by a single later verse.
One verse.
The peaceful Quran that gets quoted at interfaith dinners and on the floor of Western parliaments is almost entirely early material. The Quran itself is not arranged chronologically. It is arranged by chapter length, largest first, which means you cannot tell from reading it which verses came first and which came last and therefore which ones actually govern. That arrangement is not an accident. It is not a conspiracy either. It is just a fact that changes everything about how the book should be read and almost nobody in the West knows it.
And then there is taqiyya.
The doctrine that grants permission, under conditions judged by the person doing the deceiving, to deceive. An enemy. A spouse. Anyone, when the cause requires it. Not a conspiracy theory invented by critics. A documented feature of Islamic jurisprudence. Debated, defined, agreed upon across the major schools. In the tradition's own literature.
I need to stop here and say the thing I always have to say, because if I don't someone will say it for me and pretend it refutes everything above.
None of this means every Muslim is your enemy. I have known Muslims I would trust with my life. One of them I called a brother for ten years. The investigation that produced everything I write cost me that friendship and I have not stopped thinking about what that cost him. He was not my enemy. He was the reason I did the reading.
But here is what I need you to understand.
You are already inside this argument. You did not choose to be. The terms were set by texts written fourteen centuries ago, the mechanisms were established by jurists whose names you do not know, and the outcome is moving whether or not you are paying attention.
Understanding Islam from its own authoritative sources, not from its most marketable presentations, is not optional.It is not Islamophobia. It is literacy.
I have no degree. What I have is a nail gun, ten trades, and 1,346 audiobooks consumed while I was building other people's houses. I came to this the same way I come to everything. Primary sources first. Load-bearing joints before anything else. Nothing on ice.
Some questions are too important to leave only to people with the right letters before their names.
I totally agree but the phenomenon springs from basic historical ignorance. The French post modernist shtick only requires that one shoe horn settler colonialism into every situation to ID the righteous victim and violent western usurper. It is mindless play that avoids historical context altogether. You don't need to think merely to classify...
I love your articles. Best new voice on the current state of affairs I've read. I think you're missing something here in re: U.S. citizens, of which I am one. I defer to your compelling understanding of these intellectual trends (colonialism, de-colonialism, secularism, laicite, islamism... etc.) and on the different projects various actors and provocateurs worldwide are undertaking to gain traction in support of whatever combo-platter of these they want to inflict on the rest of us (or us on them). You're also dead right, and even understate, the degree to which US universities are totally degraded and overtaken with this divisive and unproductive nonsense.
You're missing something though, and some of my colleagues here in the comments as well, about the great unwashed here in the US here in the US who elected Trump to break things and prosecute people: the average US citizen
1) wants the government to leave it alone, would be thrilled to have it be irrelevant in their daily lives,
2) cares abstractly about other countries and their citizens, but would be thrilled to have them be irrelevant in their daily lives (as they mostly are)
3) doesn't care about the religions of others, including their belief in Allah, Christ or the flying Spaghetti Monster, and if pressed by others about their passions would say, "Good for you, but shut the &#!k up about it," only more nicely than that, because their mothers would be mad at them for talking that way (including my own)
3) is not remotely antisemitic, to the extent that they probably don't even know that they know a few people who are Jewish, even among their friends
4) is abstractly uneasy about zealous Islamism and all other isms because the off color definition of "asshole" is someone who thinks they know better what others should do and wants to do something about it (primarily because the average US citizen does respect others, regardless of sex, race, place of origin, sexual orientation or religion (but keep those last two to yourself, thanks).
The big miss though, in your article and in some of the comments, is the US government and associated corrupt institutions are totally transactional. It's all about access to the power of the purse, full stop. Philosphy and morality's got nothing to do with it. To the US government, all the pettifoggery about philosophies and "isms" you mention are talking points to frighten, divide and distract so that the dealer can palm the pot in the middle of the table (the US economy). Thank god the US really isn't a country: it's a republic, and the folks out here want to keep it that way. If Trump falters in breaking things, the republic will falter, and the US may well be lost to the purely mercantile urges of its corrupt institutions. That would be bad for US citizens and for the world, regardless of whoever else thinks they are on first for whatever philosophical reason.
Saw your interesting interview on Linges du Force. Have to agree with the host, you’ve quickly become one of the most insightful writers on the Iran war in the English language press.
Guilt and fear have always worked as "levers of power" and the steady drip of guilt for the crime of relative Western material well being has eroded our sense of moral legitimacy to even have opinions on the "underprivileged" Third World.
Fear of believing the blunt, "We hate and will destroy you" message to be real ("they can't possibly mean that") and projecting our ideal concepts of tolerant religion on those we do not understand, can not end well. Someone please inform Trump he is fighting the right enemy the wrong way.
You say what you see, and you say it well.
“…….I have put the word emerge in bold because I think that Islamic movements as we see them today in places like Belgium will end up purging those who joined them and become autonomous. Obviously…….”
Absolutely agree.
Islam and the Left initially cooperate because they share separate but operationally compatible Globalist visions, expressed in doctrinal terms.
Unfortunately, when access to the levers of power have been obtained through such a cooperation Sharia will supervene and the ideological niceties of the Left will be eliminated, along with the membership.
In the UK the Labour Party is feeling the harsh reality of this process as having served their purpose the Moslem block vote is being moved to the next bunch of ‘useful idiots’, the Green Party.
This also ties in with the Author’s perception that Global rather that domestic issues will in future drive political discourse. The fact Moslem MP’s were elected to the British Parliament at the last general election on a Gaza ticket seems to confirm that view.
and then in turn, domestic issues drive global policy? a vicious circle
You speak to a fundamental problem: understanding the peculiar, subterranean doctrines that inform media and elite views. Partisans adopt a language unfamiliar to middle class Americans, and bludgeon us with subversive concepts difficult to grasp. It is a language of denunciation and repudiation that is so new, and so contrary to common values, that we fail to grasp what is happening. Please keep excavating and explaining it.
“The ideal of the open society doesn’t simply ignore reality, it gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those who are able to maintain it.”
Mathew Crawford
That's a great quote
I think this is exactly right. The idea is so foreign to most average Americans that you hear Decolonize and you might not understand exactly what someone means by that. It's broadly accepted in American and western thought that colonization was evil and destructive to all those subjected to it. Of course the real history is much more complex and nuanced but what matters is the perception. So they build off of a false but widely accepted perception and push a they use it to push a suicidal grievance ideology that will ultimately destroy western civilization if it's adopted.
Yep. Throw in math and science are white, along with grading, honors and AP classes, “all lives matter” is a blatantly racist statement, Oct 7 atrocities were fair resistance, and boys/ men who say they are girls/women really are, and can use women’s rest rooms and compete in girls/women’s sports - etc - so many words and phrases are coded bigotry. It’s gotten to where people just remain silent rather than say anything. Wait, was that the point?
A superb article! I especially enjoyed the section "Third Worldism in the US Context" and the quote from "L'Opium des intellectuels".
Thank you, you are an execptional scholar! Coming yourself from a Third-World country, you understand so many phenomenoms mosly ignored by Amercan (for instance the "intellectual' connection between Obama and Frantz Fanon!l)
Excellent and thoughtful commentary as usual, Zineb.
Honored! Thank you.
You nailed it. For US domestic purposes, I think we need to make clear that these are anti-American forces we are encountering, on the far left and the far right. That is the best way to activate the moderate middle to reject the illiberal fringes.
https://whiterosemagazine.com/its-their-anti-americanism-stupid/
Excellent and very well-written article, Zineb! I am really glad to see that there are more and more people like you who are calling out this Third-Worldist ideology and raising awareness about the Kremlin, Tehran, the CCP, and numerous non-state actors’ roles in perpetuating these malevolent narratives and propaganda points. Keep doing great work!
In my opinion, you are really trying to understand what has happened over the past forty years, what that has led to, what the consequences for the future are, and you dare to write about it. Consider that a great compliment! Samuel Huntington writes about the clash of civilizations. I think that the Islamic world, with its theocratic vision, and the Western Christian world clash because in the Christian Western world, God and man are equal to one another. We have separated church and state. In the Islamic world, God stands above everything and man is nothing. You say it yourself with 'Islamism in its doctrinal core demands a fully ordered society ruled by religious law — Sharia'. Perhaps I am being a bit too black and white, hmm... but still.
Added to this is the fact that in Western Christian culture, driven by its convictions, the idea has taken hold over the past fifty years that it must permanently atone for what its forefathers did in the past against – or, if you will, in – that Third World. Although many people in the West no longer adhere to the Christian faith, in my opinion, it is still deeply rooted in Western culture. In other words, Christian dogmas have been replaced by other dogmas. From the perspective of Western Christian culture, you have to believe in something, after all. Let it be the climate problem, or that we must help the whole world, or whatever else instead of ourselves.
Why Should Non-Muslims Try to Understand Islam? Because It Does Not Wait For You To Decide.
I want to tell you something that almost nobody in a position to say it publicly will say plainly.
Not because it is controversial among people who have actually read the texts. It is not. It is so well established that the tradition's own greatest scholars said it first, said it clearly, and built a legal architecture around it that has been standing for over a thousand years.
They just don't say it on CNN.
Here it is.
Islam is the only major religion on earth whose authoritative legal tradition contains a framework for governing people who never chose it.
Not a fringe interpretation. Not a radical deviation. The mainstream position of classical Sunni jurisprudence. Ibn Kathir said it. Al-Suyuti said it. Al-Shafi'i said it. These are not angry men on the internet. These are the tradition's own most revered voices, the ones whose opinions still govern Islamic law today, and what they said is this: the world is divided into the house of Islam and the house of war, and the legal obligation to bring the second into the first does not expire, does not pause, and does not require your permission.
Every other major religion exists to transform the lives of people who walk through the door voluntarily. Islam does that too. But Islam also contains something none of the others do. A legal obligation toward the people who never walked through the door. And a specified set of conditions under which those people may be permitted to keep living. Under Islamic authority. Paying a tax for the privilege. Subject to restrictions. Subject to a formal, legally codified ritual of humiliation.
This is not a secret buried in a dusty manuscript. This is the tradition's own self-description. And it is sitting there in the sources, in plain Arabic, waiting for anyone willing to read it.
This is why Shariah law does not stay in Muslim-majority countries. It was never designed to.
Now. The other thing you need to understand is abrogation.
The Quran has peaceful verses. Tolerance, coexistence, patience. It also has verses commanding perpetual warfare against unbelievers until Islam is the last thing standing. If you are expecting me to tell you these two things somehow harmonize, I am going to disappoint you.
The Islamic legal tradition has a formal mechanism for resolving this problem. It is called naskh. We say abrogation. Think of it as a software update. The most recent instruction overrides everything before it. The Quran was not delivered all at once. It came over roughly twenty-three years, piece by piece, and in Islamic jurisprudence the later material governs the earlier material when they conflict.
Al-Suyuti. One of the tradition's greatest scholars. Counted more than one hundred peaceful verses cancelled out by a single later verse.
One verse.
The peaceful Quran that gets quoted at interfaith dinners and on the floor of Western parliaments is almost entirely early material. The Quran itself is not arranged chronologically. It is arranged by chapter length, largest first, which means you cannot tell from reading it which verses came first and which came last and therefore which ones actually govern. That arrangement is not an accident. It is not a conspiracy either. It is just a fact that changes everything about how the book should be read and almost nobody in the West knows it.
And then there is taqiyya.
The doctrine that grants permission, under conditions judged by the person doing the deceiving, to deceive. An enemy. A spouse. Anyone, when the cause requires it. Not a conspiracy theory invented by critics. A documented feature of Islamic jurisprudence. Debated, defined, agreed upon across the major schools. In the tradition's own literature.
I need to stop here and say the thing I always have to say, because if I don't someone will say it for me and pretend it refutes everything above.
None of this means every Muslim is your enemy. I have known Muslims I would trust with my life. One of them I called a brother for ten years. The investigation that produced everything I write cost me that friendship and I have not stopped thinking about what that cost him. He was not my enemy. He was the reason I did the reading.
But here is what I need you to understand.
You are already inside this argument. You did not choose to be. The terms were set by texts written fourteen centuries ago, the mechanisms were established by jurists whose names you do not know, and the outcome is moving whether or not you are paying attention.
Understanding Islam from its own authoritative sources, not from its most marketable presentations, is not optional.It is not Islamophobia. It is literacy.
I have no degree. What I have is a nail gun, ten trades, and 1,346 audiobooks consumed while I was building other people's houses. I came to this the same way I come to everything. Primary sources first. Load-bearing joints before anything else. Nothing on ice.
Some questions are too important to leave only to people with the right letters before their names.
That is what this is about.
A. C. Rosenthal
https://acrosenthal.substack.com/p/books-and-curriculum-a-c-rosenthal
The free Western societies face a battle of survival, and they are not even aware of it.
I totally agree but the phenomenon springs from basic historical ignorance. The French post modernist shtick only requires that one shoe horn settler colonialism into every situation to ID the righteous victim and violent western usurper. It is mindless play that avoids historical context altogether. You don't need to think merely to classify...
I love your articles. Best new voice on the current state of affairs I've read. I think you're missing something here in re: U.S. citizens, of which I am one. I defer to your compelling understanding of these intellectual trends (colonialism, de-colonialism, secularism, laicite, islamism... etc.) and on the different projects various actors and provocateurs worldwide are undertaking to gain traction in support of whatever combo-platter of these they want to inflict on the rest of us (or us on them). You're also dead right, and even understate, the degree to which US universities are totally degraded and overtaken with this divisive and unproductive nonsense.
You're missing something though, and some of my colleagues here in the comments as well, about the great unwashed here in the US here in the US who elected Trump to break things and prosecute people: the average US citizen
1) wants the government to leave it alone, would be thrilled to have it be irrelevant in their daily lives,
2) cares abstractly about other countries and their citizens, but would be thrilled to have them be irrelevant in their daily lives (as they mostly are)
3) doesn't care about the religions of others, including their belief in Allah, Christ or the flying Spaghetti Monster, and if pressed by others about their passions would say, "Good for you, but shut the &#!k up about it," only more nicely than that, because their mothers would be mad at them for talking that way (including my own)
3) is not remotely antisemitic, to the extent that they probably don't even know that they know a few people who are Jewish, even among their friends
4) is abstractly uneasy about zealous Islamism and all other isms because the off color definition of "asshole" is someone who thinks they know better what others should do and wants to do something about it (primarily because the average US citizen does respect others, regardless of sex, race, place of origin, sexual orientation or religion (but keep those last two to yourself, thanks).
The big miss though, in your article and in some of the comments, is the US government and associated corrupt institutions are totally transactional. It's all about access to the power of the purse, full stop. Philosphy and morality's got nothing to do with it. To the US government, all the pettifoggery about philosophies and "isms" you mention are talking points to frighten, divide and distract so that the dealer can palm the pot in the middle of the table (the US economy). Thank god the US really isn't a country: it's a republic, and the folks out here want to keep it that way. If Trump falters in breaking things, the republic will falter, and the US may well be lost to the purely mercantile urges of its corrupt institutions. That would be bad for US citizens and for the world, regardless of whoever else thinks they are on first for whatever philosophical reason.
Saw your interesting interview on Linges du Force. Have to agree with the host, you’ve quickly become one of the most insightful writers on the Iran war in the English language press.
It is an uphill battle. Faith tramples reason. Attempting to translate feelings is a mugs game, but the translations continue.
Guilt and fear have always worked as "levers of power" and the steady drip of guilt for the crime of relative Western material well being has eroded our sense of moral legitimacy to even have opinions on the "underprivileged" Third World.
Fear of believing the blunt, "We hate and will destroy you" message to be real ("they can't possibly mean that") and projecting our ideal concepts of tolerant religion on those we do not understand, can not end well. Someone please inform Trump he is fighting the right enemy the wrong way.