The Forever Jihad

This is a series of essays written over several months on the nature of Islamic expansionism, whether violent or not.

Almost two years ago I wrote a long essay, with sequels, observing that while Osama bin Laden has strategic goals, he never had a strategic plan. His goals are evident from his own declarations and are -

1. Expel America's armed forces from Saudi Arabia, emplace Islamist regimes and sociopolitical order there and expel all non-Muslims of any sort,

2. Emplace Islamism in the other countries of the Persian Gulf,

3. Then reclaim Islamic rule of all lands that were ever under Islamic control and emplace Islamism there,

4. Convert the rest of the world to Islamism.

Convinced that America was a "weak horse" which would not go to war in the face of its fury, bin Laden guided al Qaeda in an escalating series of terrorist attacks against American targets during the 1990s which evoked little response from America. Then came 9/11 and America's energetic strikes directed first against Taliban- and al Qaeda-controlled Afghanistan, then against terrorism- and al Qaeda-supporter Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

From October 2001 until perhaps the last quarter of 2004, al Qaeda reeled from these blows, suffering as well from anti-terrorist purges in Saudi Arabia and the closure of many of its economic systems that existed before 9/11. Hence, I observed in September 2003,

I see no evidence that bin Laden has ever had any plan except violence itself, committing it where he could, when he could. He commits violence against Western targets with no vision apparent beyond the violence. He has no idea of how to constitute a true nation state. He is a man whose vision extends no further than more fighting, which is to say, he has no vision at all.

Even leaving bin Laden himself out of the overall analysis and referring to al Qaeda in general this analysis can still be seen to apply in major ways. Observed MichaelWilliams in referring to a NYT article last May,

the NYT has discovered that the islamofacist terrorists have no plan in Iraq, or really anywhere else in the world. They've got no coherent agenda, no plan to achieve that non-agenda, no leaders, no political presence, and no hope of victory. At least from our perspective.

Then, citing the article itself:

Counter-insurgency experts are baffled, wondering if the world is seeing the birth of a new kind of insurgency; if, as in China in the 1930's or Vietnam in the 1940's, it is taking insurgents a few years to organize themselves; or if, as some suspect, there is a simpler explanation.

"Instead of saying, 'What's the logic here, we don't see it,' you could speculate, there is no logic here," said Anthony James Joes, a professor of political science at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and the author of several books on the history of guerrilla warfare. The attacks now look like "wanton violence," he continued. "And there's a name for these guys: Losers."

"The insurgents are doing everything wrong now," he said. "Or, anyway, I don't understand why they're doing what they're doing."

Now, after politically-charged bombings in Madrid and London, I am starting to believe that the rudiments of a strategic plan can be discerned. These bombings are weak manifestations of al Qaeda's strategic plan to emerge victorious.

It's no Einsteinian insight to say that the Madrid bombings and the London bombings were intended to push Spain and Britain out of military engagement in Iraq. That much is obvious, and in Spain's case it succeeded.

So here is the first point I'll explore in a subsequent post: in al Qaeda's mind bombings against Europe have a different political intention than another attack against the United States would have, and are intended only to accelerate achieving al Qaeda's goals rather than bring achieving them about.

Related to this point is that we have to understand al Qaeda's strategy differently than we've been thinking about it (me included). I made a key error in my 2003 post: it was true then and mostly true now that al Qaeda has no military strategy worthy of the name, but it is not therefore true that it has no strategy at all.

Before they are terrorists, "insurgents," urban guerrillas or anything else, al Qaeda's members, no matter how loose their membership is, are eschatological, religious absolutists . Their strategy - and I think it fits the definition thereof - is first and foremost religious. Unfortunately, violence is really the central tenet of their religion, that without which Islamism would not be what it is. Far from being a "religion of peace," their brand if Islam is a religion of war, of death, of violence and oppression.

The seeds of this line of thought may be found here.


Part Two: Islamism v. jihadism

Austin Bay documents how al Qaeda's chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has had a falling out with his religious mentor, Isam Mohammed al-Barqawi, because Barqawi told al Jazeera television that "the number of Iraqis killed in suicide operations has become a tragedy." To which Zarqawi warned,

"... do not follow the path of Satan that leads to your destruction. Beware, our noble sheik, of the trick of God’s enemies to lure you to drive a wedge in the ranks of the mujahedeen."

I am wondering whether we are starting to see a split forming within Islamism. Maybe it would help to explain the difference between Islam and Islamism - a distinction, by the way, of meaning mostly to the West; Muslims themselves do not generally make it.

Islamism has been defined by scholars such as Gilles Kepel as "political Islam" and it existed long before Osama bin Laden came along. (See my PDF essay on the history of Arab terrorism.) What we call Islamism began some decades ago as a Muslim reform movement and was not originally violent. Islamists generally call for the unification of a Muslim country's law and social order under the umbrella of sharia, strict Islamic law. The apparati of the state, the mosque and civil society would be a single, organic unity.

Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the closing days of 1979, Islamism began a merger with jihadism. I would define jihadism as a war-based, expansive, aggressive form of Islamism for which the use of violence is the central tactic. Jihadists have strict boundaries marking who is a true Muslim and who is not. Generally, jihadists consider only themselves, supportive Islamists and submissive ordinary Muslims as falling within true Islam. Even bona fide Islamists like Barqawi who seem to have reservations about the indiscriminate lethality of jihadis can fall into the category of Muslim apostate, for whom death is the penalty.

Hence, Zarqawis warning to his now-former Islamist mentor that he is following the "path of Satan" is a clear indication that jihadism allows no self-critical thinking. To be accused of following Satan is one of the worst accusations a Muslim can make of another Muslim and clearly indicates that Zarqawi believes Barqawi is at least dangerously close to apostasy.

Jihadism is a virulent outgrowth of Islam. I think that jihadism should now be distinguished from Islamism, although the two are still closely related in their religious theory. But their practices are starting to diverge, at least a little, even though Islamism and jihadism have the same long-term objectives. Their differences concern not what they want to accomplish, only how. (I delineated the objectives in part one of this series.)



Part 3: Are suicide bombers the new High Priests of Islam?

This part explores the theology of suicide martyrdom, its theological relationship to Judaism and Christianity and why jihadism is a religion of despair.

I linked in my main blog, without commentary, to "Are you ready? Tomorrow you will be in Paradise . . .", a profile of suicide bombers and their training by Pakistani Muslim Nasra Hassan. (Update: the Times article is now behind a paywall; the link now goes to its printing in The New Yorker.)

Hassan was given extensive access to Palestinian trainers of suicide bombers and their bombers in training. The whole piece is well worth your time, bit for the nonce I want to focus on this part, her conversation with a volunteer she identifies only as "S." S had been shot in the head by Israeli security after pressing his detonator. His bomb failed to explode. After a two-month coma, the Israelis concluded he was brain dead and sent him home to die. But he recovered. Here are excerpts:

In Gaza, S is celebrated as a young man who “gave his life to Allah” and whom Allah “brought back to life”.

“How did you feel when you heard that you’d been selected for martyrdom?” I asked.

“It’s as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or Hell,” he said. “Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven.”

“What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.

“The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’

Ms. Hassan also interviewed "an imam affiliated with Hamas, a youthful, bearded graduate of the prestigious al Azhar University in Cairo."

He explained that the first drop of blood shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of Resurrection, he can intercede for 70 of his nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The imam took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

In Islam, unlike Christianity, there is no doctrine of divine, unmerited grace by which human beings are saved to eternal life. Haverford College's Prof. Mark Gould explained in, "Understanding Jihad,"

the requirement to act in accordance with God’s decrees, possible but nonetheless difficult to fulfill, thus attaining salvation, may be short-circuited when fulfilling the religious obligation of jihad. There, either one accomplishes good works (as decreed by God) or dies a martyr; if the former, one enhances one’s chances of being sent to heaven at the Last Judgment; if the latter, one goes directly to heaven. ...

God has requested nothing that believers cannot do. ... man’s nature enables him to act in ways that merit God’s grace. While not easy to follow, the rules do not demand anything that people are incapable of accomplishing through their own capacities; the rules guide men to paradise.

What I find intensely interesting, from a religious standpoint, are two things:

1. that jihadism embraces the concept of eternal salvation through the voluntary giving of one's life, and that

2. the one who sacrificed himself can, by virtue of his self-sacrifical act, grant entry into paradise for 70 others who lack merit on their own to enter. That is, their sins are remitted not by what they do, but by what the self-sacrificed one did.

Remission of sins through the shedding of blood is deeply rooted in the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Before any of those faiths were born, child sacrifice was done to appease and placate the local gods of city states or local areas. Abrahamic Hebraism denounced the practice and substituted the sacrifice of goats or bulls. Long before Jesus' day a complex Temple system had evolved in Judaism that was designed to gain annual remission of the sins of the whole population through the ritual sacrifice of, in turn, a bull and a goat by the high priest for remission of his own sins and then the banishment of another, flawless goat into the wilderness. On its head had been ritually applied the sins of the Jewish people. The goat, literally the "scapegoat," carried the sins away. According to Shalom Ministries of New York, in very ancient times the goat was to be led into the wilderness and left there. In time, the Jewish people became concerned that the goat could find its way back into the camp and thus bring back the sins of the nation. So in order to ensure that the sins of the nation would be carried away by the scapegoat, never to return, the scapegoat came to be led up a steep cliff and thrown down.

The Christian book of Hebrews uses the Temple sacrificial system as the model for explaining how the death of Christ saves all who believe in him as son of God and risen savior. The salvific work of the Jewish High Priest had to be repeated each year at Yom Kippur. But, explains Hebrews, Jesus has no need to offer sacrifices over and over again because of his divine identity. His sacrificial acts were perfect, complete and eternal. By his own death he carried away all the sins of all whom follow him and accept him as risen Lord. All our atonement to God is already done by Jesus Christ for all time; we cannot accomplish any part of it.

From their inception, Judaism and its child Christianity affirmed vicarious salvation - that the saving of the many had to be accomplished by the efficacious acts of the one. In Temple Judaism, the one was the High Priest. The people relied completely on the work of the High Priest to remit their sins at Yom Kippur. No one else could perform his function. In Christianity, Christ, being of the very nature God and in fact a person of the Godhead, "holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever" and so,

Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself (Heb. 7:24-27).

What jihadism has done within an Islamic framework is effectively to assign to suicide shahidi, martyrs, the role of high priest. Islam, never having fallen under the sway of Roman law and culture like Christianity did, has more affinity to Judaism than Christianity; both religions developed from a Semitic ethnicity, anyway. A suicide shahid performs in micro functions very similar to the Temple’s High Priest: he earns his own salvation and intercedes, priestlike, to guarantee salvation for others - 70 others, according to the Egyptian imam. The difference between a suicide shahid and the Temple's High Priest the two are enormous, of course. The Temple High Priest committed no murder and shed no human blood. Yet that is what the shahidi do.

Priesthood in both Judaism and Christianity has always been seen as a holy office, occupied by men and women divinely selected. One thing that makes a priest a priest is the intercessory function, the recognized ability to act as intermediary between the people and the deity. Protestantism typically has pastors, not priests formally called, but still usually recognizes the exclusivity of this function in the administration of ordinances or sacraments, almost always reserved only to pastors. Moreover, most Protestants affirm a doctrine of the "priesthood of believers" for one another in the community of faith. (Frequently this concept is misquoted and misunderstood as "the priesthood of the believer," erroneously implying that a Christian can be a priest on his own behalf. Not so.)

The major part of ordination procedures in both Catholicism and Protestantism focuses on discerning and affirming the divine call; the validation by the Church that one is divinely called to the priesthood or pastorate is the most important matter in conferring ordination.

But the idea that a shahid can assume priestly authority simply by volunteering omits the idea of divine appointment. As Ms. Hassan points out, the most important matter in selection and training of a suicide shahid is implanting the determination of the shahid selectee that s/he will actually complete the deed.

Because Islam is a religion in which salvation results solely from human achievement ("works," in the usual Christian parlance), not a gift of divine grace, there is a strong implication of despair about Islam itself in the theology of suicide martyrdom. Christianity holds that human beings are born in the grip of sin and that no merely human effort can overcome either that "original sin" nor sins of volition committed in life. Likewise, there is no human sin that Christ's salvific work cannot remit. Hence, this life is always one of hope that the future can be better, both in this life and life to come. "The gates of Hell," wrote C.S. Lewis, "are locked only on the inside."

There is no concept of original sin in Islam. There are only the sins of volition. These are overcome or remitted by obeying the precepts and commandments of Allah. Not all sins have equal weight and not all virtuous acts have equal merit. Since Mohammed's day martyrdom has been held so meritorious that by itself it remits a lifetime of sin.

But the theology that a shahid can bring 70 people into paradise who otherwise have not earned it themselves is a new thing in Islamic thought, as far as I can determine. Heretofore, the shahid's self sacrifice earned his own salvation; now it earns the salvation of dozens, at least in jihadist Islam. The belief betrays, I think, a growing realization among the Islamic ummah that Allah's demands are indeed more than humans can reliably achieve and shows a lack of faith at a fundamental level. It is the addition of vicarious sacrifice to Islam and the invention of a proto-doctrine of unmerited divine favor (that is, salvation by grace) in a religion whose formal structure and theology make no room for it.

It is no tragedy that so many Muslims are embracing this theological precept. The enormous tragedy is that they are doing so violently, taking the lives of thousands of innocents. Yet I have to wonder whether this theological shift in contemporary Islam makes its adherents more amenable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, whose voluntary offering of life makes him able to intercede not for a mere 70 souls, but for all souls of all time.

-------

Note: I should also point out that the conceptualization of salvation has varied from ancient Jews, Christians and Muslims. The salvation sought through the Temple sacrificial system in ancient Judaism was little focused on life hereafter; even a belief in a general resurrection in the age to come was slow to develop. The salvation sought by the ancient Jews was primarily understood in terms of national health - the fruitfulness of the fields and flocks of the nation, its security among its neighbors and the increase of trade and prosperity - and most of all, peace. Yet even in the darkest times of their history, the Jews always affirmed that God's faithfulness to his people: "For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope" (Jer 29:11). They saw God as deity, yes, but also as a partner in life who abided with them and was literally present with them in their lives and history.

In Christianity a greater focus came that emphasized the survival of individuals after death in the presence of God. "Eternal life" moved toward the center of Christian understanding of salvation, but with only a some cultic exceptions it never became the overwhelming concern. From the days of Jesus' ministry his followers have understood that while the Kingdom of God has not yet come in power, it is discernibly present in the here and now among the Christian faithful. Indeed, Christ was known from the first as Immanuel, "God With Us." Hence, there has always been a major line of Christian understanding that salvation included a "life abundant" in the here and now. We are saved not just in the hereafter but also in the here-now; salvation is begun in this life and completed in the eschaton. Salvation is lived out now in worship, service, charity and love. We can experience heaven now, if only "as in a mirror, dimly," as Paul put it in 1 Cor. 13:12. Also, Christians say we are "seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror [and] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another..." (2 Cor. 3:18).

But in jihadism salvation, though earned in the here and now, is not realized at all until after death. The object of suicide martyrdom is not to improve life for the faithful in this life but to guarantee admission to paradise after death. While this concept is not identical with historic Islam, it is not very distant, either. As Prof. Gould pointed out,

... there is an authentic Islamic tradition that partially explains the predisposition to the use of force, in jihad, that is diffused widely among contemporary Muslims.

This is a theology of eschatology that basically denies any value to the created order and the present life and confers all value onto the hereafter and paradise. Islam has always held that Allah is not on earth, he is solely in his heaven. Without a divine presence within and among the created order and its creatures, infusing them with divine value, there is nothing here of ultimate worth. Jihadism, then, is a form of nihilism and like all nihilism is a religion of despair.


Part Four: Where do the French riots fit in to Islamic expansionism?
Written Nov. 9, 2005

So far I have reviewed al Qaeda’s objectives and strategy, explained the distinction between Islamism and jihadism and discussed the theology of Islamic suicide bombings. A short review:

** Islamists call for the unification of a Muslim country’s law and social order under the umbrella of sharia, strict Islamic law. The apparati of the state, the mosque and civil society would be a single, organic unity.

** Jihadism is a war-based, expansive, aggressive form of Islamism for which the use of violence is the central tactic.

** After jihadism swallowed Islamism beginning in the 1970s, they are starting to diverge again, at least a little. But their differences concern not what they want to accomplish, only how.

In this chapter, I am looking again at how Islamists and jihadists diverge from one another but also how they are unified in their central goals. Does their dynamic tension with one another come into play among the large Muslim populations of Europe? I think it does.

Are the French riots "Muslim" riots?

There is no unanimity among Western commentators on exactly where Islam fits into the riots of the last two weeks in Paris and elsewhere in France. Tony Blankley of the Washington Times writes that the riots are indeed specifically Muslim in character:

Even when the current violence subsides ... it will not be the end of the story. A new benchmark of the possible will have been established. The flaccid and timorous response of the French government will only increase the radicalizing Muslim elements' contempt for Western cultural weakness.

As Paul Belien, writing from Brussels this weekend observed: "It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularized welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The "youths" do not blame the French, they despise them."

On the other hand, journalist Souheila Al-Jadda puts the problem in conventional terms of Western liberal tradition:

If France wants to avoid paying for past mistakes in a wider European intifada — similar unrest has been reported in Germany and Belgium — its leaders must do more to provide immigrant citizens greater equality in terms of job opportunities, civil liberties and education. They must acknowledge the frustrations of the youth and genuinely implement sweeping reforms to improve social conditions for minorities. Finally, they must not forget the slogan of their country's own revolution, which represents the founding principles of the French republic, "Liberty, equality, fraternity," for all.

My take is closer to Ms. Al-Jadda's than Mr. Blankley's, but Blankley's analysis is best seen as predictive rather than explanatory. The rioters are almost exclusively Muslim, true, but their motives for rioting are not Islamist. Not this time. But Islamist agitators are certainly encouraged by the violence and are already active in winning converts.

Whence the rioters?

Austin Bay explains succinctly:

Migrants from France's former Muslim colonies initially came to France seeking jobs, often the jobs the French no longer deigned to do. The immigrants stayed. Whether the immigrants wanted to assimilate (of course many do, some do not), assimilation has not occurred. Now, France's "Muslim neighborhoods" and "African neighborhoods" exist as permanent "cultural islands," scarred by high unemployment and bitter resentment. These are the "quartiers sensible" -- the sensitive neighborhoods.

Back in August 2002, Theodore Dalrymple explained the breakdown of French law and social contract for which today's riots may be seen as the result, not the cause. With all the news of the thousands of cars burned by rioters,

Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today [2002], while the population has grown by less than 20 percent (and many think today’s crime number is an underestimate by at least a half). In 2000, one crime was reported for every sixth inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased by at least 10 percent a year for the last five years. Reported cases of arson in France have increased 2,500 percent in seven years, from 1,168 in 1993 to 29,192 in 2000; robbery with violence rose by 15.8 percent between 1999 and 2000, and 44.5 percent since 1996 (itself no golden age).

The increases came almost exclusively "from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially."

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them.

Setting fire to cars and anything else is no new thing:

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy.

Remember, Dalrymple was writing three years ago. These ghettoes are of France's own making. The African zones were built to house the hundreds of thousands of north and west African immigrants whom France brought in for labor between 30-40 years ago. But these immigrants - the parents and grandparents of today's rioters - did not assimilate into French culture. Most of them wanted to become French citizens in every sense of the word, but they were deliberately kept physically isolated.

Then the economic boom that brought them to France collapsed at the same time France passionately embraced full-scale socialism and labor controls. The durable unemployment rate in France is 10 percent, a rate that would cause an American political party badly to lose the next election. But that rate is deceptive because among the 20s and under demographic, the rate is much higher. Among the second- or third-generation immigrant populations, says Dalrymple, "long-term unemployment among the young is so rife there that it is the normal state of being."

[A]lready culturally distinct from the bulk of the population, they feel themselves vilely discriminated against. Having been enclosed in a physical ghetto, they respond by building a cultural and psychological ghetto for themselves. They are of France, but not French.

This social and cultural religious environment is fertile soil for Islamist recruiters. And Mr. Dalrymple explained that, too.

[I]magine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned? Would you not seek a “worthwhile” direction for the energy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a relatively few of like mind to cause havoc. Islamist proselytism flourishes in the prisons of France ... .

Islamists are determined that all of human existence be brought under the sway of Islam (as they define Islam, of course). While we rightly continue to worry about and guard against deadly attacks against us by al Qaeda, the long-term menace of Islamism is not jihadism. Jihadists, because they are overtly military in nature, can be effectively (though not always easily) defeated with our own military. Jihadists attack with hammer blows. Remove the hammer and its wielders and construct strong enough shields and the blows and their effects will be reduced.

But Islamism is like a fog that enfolds itself within and around, over and through a society. Western countries have a long tradition of religious freedom, but this freedom is predicated on the presumption that religious freedom will not threaten the political nature and autonomy of the state. This is true even in Europe, where the "separation of church and state" took a very long time and no little blood to be gained. It is not complete there, of course; France is still officially a Catholic country, for example. But on the whole, Europe's countries do not rely on religion to order their polity or the political orientations of their citizens.

The entry of large Muslim populations into this system, whether entry by immigration or conversion, is a deep challenge to Westernism's survival. It simply remains to be seen whether Islam itself can be politically pluralist in countries where it holds sway. Islamism, of course, does not even pretend to pluralism.

European Islamists have long demanded religious-legal autonomy for Muslims. Tony Blankley documented the Islamist-separatist demands they are making:

[L]ook what a typical radical Muslim leader, Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of the Brussels-based Arab European League says: "We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the Westerners."

Or consider the statement of a German radical Islamist that I recounted in my book (based on a National Public Radio news story broadcast): "Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We [Muslims] will say what we want. We'll live how we want. It's outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture."

An NPR story reported that "an imam at a Berlin mosque was secretly filmed calling Germans "unbelievers" who "can only burn in hell."

Muslims make up about 4 percent of the German population, but their influence on German society is growing. For example, a German Muslim group won a court battle to impose its own Islamic teaching in Berlin's public schools.

Simply put, the dictates of the Quran cannot be reconciled with the social mores and liberties of Western society. Hence, Muslims living in the West are faced with basically three choices.

(1) Embrace secularism. They can ignore some of the Quranic particulars and accept secularism as the norm. But this makes Islam and their Muslim identity a matter for the mosque, while Islam formally claims dominion over the entire of a person's life, not just private beliefs;

(2) Accommodationism. They can make the best accommodation they can, adhering to Islamic requirements as best as possible and interacting with secualr society as little as possible, or

(3) Separatism. they can demand their country allow autonomous or mostly autonomous Islamic communities, ruiled mostly or exclusively by Islamic law.

The first option makes a Muslim apostate in practice if not in attitude. Because Islam is a religion in which practice is paramount, this option would be automatically repulsive to a Muslim who wished to remain true. Moreover, apostasy is perhaps the worst sin a Muslim can commit. Islam usually defines apostasy as actual conversion to another religion, but it's worth noting in the present context that Islamists and especially jihadists don't shrink from calling apostate those whose Islamic practice is not strict enough. Since jihadists show a willing propensity to murder apostate Muslims, including Muslims whom most Muslims consider faithful, embracing state and social secularism can be literally life risking.

Accommodation was, of course, how Jews lived for centuries in eastern Europe and in some places in the west. Ironically, Jews in Germany lived more like non-Jews than Jews did in any other European country. In most every way, the victims of 1938's Kristallnacht were Germans who happened to be Jews, not Jews who happened to live in Germany.

Accommodationism would appear to be an option for Muslims in Europe. But it is not. Accommodationism depends on two things, neither of which pertains for Muslims in Europe. First, Muslims who wish to accommodate (or assimilate) would have to enjoy good prospects for economic success and social mobility. That is almost entirely absent in France and much of the rest of Europe. Second, Islam would have to have "theological space" for faithful living as a minority in a non-Muslim society. But Islam has no such space.

The audio file at this NPR page about Islam and Europe is worth listening to. It makes the point that Muslims in Europe are living as a minority in a secular society, something that Muslims have never done before.

There is nothing in Islam that instructs Muslims how to do that. From Mohammed's day until now, Islam has always assumed that it would rule the societies in which it existed. Indeed, correct Muslim living actually depends on living among a Muslim ummah.

So separatism becomes almost the default choice. An example is last summer's case in Germany:

The deeply religious Muslim parents of the 11-year-old student were trying to prevent their son from attending swimming classes, where he would mix with girls in bathing suits. They filed a complaint in a Düsseldorf court against school officials. But the court rejected their case, saying that religious beliefs are not a reason to prevent children from attending swimming classes and said that the boy must attend them in the future.

As Muslim populations grow in number, separatism will increase. The trend will be accelerated by the fact that, just as in the Parisian cites, Islamism is on the rise among Europe's Muslims not in the first generation of Muslim immigrants, but among their children and especially grandchildren. And converts from the host countries. NPR reported in 2003,

"What they share is a sense of exclusion," says NPR Senior European Correspondent Sylvia Poggioli. The children of those immigrants present a different challenge: many second- and third-generation Muslims born to secular European societies are re-examining both their identity as children of another land, and their religious beliefs.

This is the most serious challenge of Islamism: that over the decades to come, Islamist separatists become a numerical, hence political majority. Then several European countries would become officially Islamic. Is that realistically possible?

Mark Steyn wrote in the Telegraph that the French riots are "an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war."

If the insurgents emerge emboldened, what next? In five years' time, there will be even more of them, and even less resolve on the part of the French state. That, in turn, is likely to accelerate the demographic decline. Europe could face a continent-wide version of the "white flight" phenomenon seen in crime-ridden American cities during the 1970s, as Danes and Dutch scram to America, Australia or anywhere else that will have them.

There is a civil war going on, but despite the violence in France, it is mostly not a violent civil war. Nor is it entirely accurate to describe the struggle as one for hearts and minds.

More than that, it is a struggle for our souls, and such struggles are always the most enduring of all.


Part Five - The New Front Lines

As a short review, here are the four goals of Islamism.

1. Expel America’s armed forces from Saudi Arabia, emplace Islamist regimes and sociopolitical order there and expel all non-Muslims of any sort,

2. Emplace Islamism in the other countries of the Persian Gulf,

3. Then reclaim Islamic rule of all lands that were ever under Islamic control and emplace Islamism there,

4. Convert the rest of the world to Islamism.

The distinction I drew between Islamists and jihadists is that while all jihadists are Islamists, not all Islamists are jihadists. Today Dan Darling at Winds of Change points out that "al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri's most [recent] statement ... that included yet another denunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood's" - Islamism Central, they - "participation in Egyptian politics." Islamists are willing to achieve their goals without violence, although they don't shrink from violence per se in achieving their goals. Pacifists they are not. Jihadists, on the other hand, reply almost exclusively on violence and make it their primary, if not only tool.

While jihadism is more lethal now, Islamism is more pernicious and more dangerous to the West in the long term. It's important to remember that Islamism and jihadism are two sides of the same coin. They are each examples of extreme Islamic triumphalism. In addressing the riots last fall, I observed,

But Islamism is like a fog that enfolds itself within and around, over and through a society. Western countries have a long tradition of religious freedom, but this freedom is predicated on the presumption that religious freedom will not threaten the political nature and autonomy of the state. This is true even in Europe, where the “separation of church and state” took a very long time and no little blood to be gained. It is not complete there, of course; France is still officially a Catholic country, for example. But on the whole, Europe’s countries do not rely on religion to order their polity or the political orientations of their citizens.

The entry of large Muslim populations into this system, whether entry by immigration or conversion, is a deep challenge to Westernism’s survival. It simply remains to be seen whether Islam itself can be politically pluralist in countries where it holds sway. Islamism, of course, does not even pretend to pluralism.

Now comes Mark Steyn's invaluable essay in The New Criterion, "It’s the demography, stupid." He answers my question rather forthrightly up front:

Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

This is a grim forecast, no doubt. Steyn's arguments are daunting to rebut. Without excerpting them at length, he basically points out the demographic doomsday looming over Europe. Baldly put: ethnic Europeans are not having enough children. For 100 men and women (we no longer really say "husbands and wives," do we?) of Europe to replace themselves in the next generation, they need to give birth to 105 children. That's 2.1 children per woman. But they're not.

Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent.

Europe's socialist economy is ungodly expensive to maintain and no one, no one, there is willing to cut back on the governmental or government-mandated financial entitlements that have grown up since the end of World War II. Steyn is no Nostradamus about Europe; many others have pointed out the demographic bombs awaiting Europe. "Bombs" plural I say because the decline of the birth rate at the low end of the age scale always means that the populations gets grayer at the high end. As I pointed out almost three years ago, demography is a double-sprung trap. Right now the median age of Americans is in the mid-30s, with most of Europe a little higher. But American adults are barely replacing themselves while Europeans are not, so by mid-century our median age will rise a tick and the Europeans' will rocket by 15 years to the low 50s.

So who is going to pay for all those luscious European retirement benefits, especially since right now more than half of men across Europe stop working between age 55-65? And there's a financial paradox to be faced even if European governments and elites suddenly decided to encourage birthin' more babies:

They need more births, but that takes women out of the work force - and for longer than it does here, because of Europe's generally very generous labor-welfare rules. But taking women from the work force also decreases the tax revenue the state needs to continue propping up its welfare system.

Let us assume for argument's sake that the welfare-near-crisis states achieved a substantial jump in birth rates starting next year. They will probably go broke sooner than they will now because it will be basically 20 years before next year's babies become taxpayers and for those two decades they simply increase the welfare load by using government-provided services.

Can Europe bail water faster than the gunwales will go awash? I don't think so, but I hope I'm wrong.

Guess who the gap filler is. Steyn again:

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent. ...

Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Because Europeans are not having children anywhere close to the rate needed to maintain their own economies, much less their cultural civilization, they are importing Africans, Near Easterners and some Asians and Indians to do it for them. By far these immigrants are Muslim. And unlike ethnic Europeans, Muslims are having baby Muslims at breakneck speed.

Consider Israel. I wrote about its demographic challenge as a beginning blogger in April 2002 in "The Palestinian population bomb" (all figures from 2002):

There are six million Israelis. Only 4.8 million are Jewish. Fifteen percent of Israel's citizens are Muslim Arabs, 900,000 people. They are Israeli Palestinians. They are, or are descended from, persons who did not become refugee in Israel's war for independence in 1947-1948. (The other five percent of Israelis are neither Muslim nor Jewish.)

There are more than three million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Right now there are four million Muslims in Israel/West Bank/Gaza. Jews outnumber them by a mere 800,000. At current growth rates of each, in 14 years the ratio will be reversed: 6.7 million Muslims and 6 million Jews. ...

The only effective thing that Israel can do, militarily, is create conditions that force the Palestinians to abandon violence so that socio-political agreements may be reached. But even if this happens, the Muslim population bomb will keep ticking.

Maybe these data compelled Ariel Sharon to make the breathtaking concessions to the Palestinians.

So there is an enormous, if not actually massive, population shift going on between Europe and its southern and easter littorals. Except it's not "between," it's one way. While the commentati lament the lack of economic integration of European societies for the North African and Middle Eastern immigrants, not altogether without justification, they may want to consider the population pressures that impel such large numbers of Muslims to move there. The Middle East itself is not exactly a land of brimming opportunity.

Europe long ago shed its Christian heritage. Church attendance in western Europe is generally less than 10 percent, often much less. I remember getting an email from a Norwegian pastor a few years ago in which he said that Sunday services were practically deserted; no one came to church except for weddings or funerals. When I lived in Germany in the mid-1980s, attendance was just under five percent. The result is not that for ethnic Europeans another religion has supplanted Christianity but that nothing has. Christian dynamism has been ejected from European society and has been replaced with . . . nihilism.

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

... We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end.

The result? Steyn again:

[T]he political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path... .

Into this demographic and religious vaccum has stepped political Islam. Islam has in the last 35 years or so become deeply expansionist in general, not just in its Islamist fringe. While giving only lip service to the idea of economic integration into their countries, the Europeans, except the British, have shunned the idea of socio-cultural-political integration of the masses of Muslim immigrants. The second and third generations of the first wave of immigrants on the 1960s have basically renounced the whole integrationist enterprise altogther. New immigrants now need have no expectation or even use for integration; there are ready-made Muslim ghettoes awaiting them across the continent, bought and paid for by the socialist, entitlement-as-an-entitlement governments and societies who need their labor more than their ingtegration.

But the Europe-dwelling Muslims won't accept nihilism. It may be true that last fall's rioters were not rebelling from a very Muslim basis - this time. But the disenfranchised, immigrant populations of Europe are where Islamist evangelists are having their greatest successes, especially among those who have run afoul of the law. They offer order, structure and discipline to stangers living in a strange land, and for certain Old Europe is no longer offering any of them. Unlike Old European churches, mosques promise righteousness can be attained in this world and heaven in the next.

Mark Steyn writes that,

... the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

For all the concern and countermeasures that jihadism commands for us now, it is non-violent Islamism that poses the greatest threat to the survival of the West as the West. Europe has simply abandoned the playing field. America is still on it, but only barely.