Is Islamism an Ideological Threat to Europe?

Few names have had more maledictions heaped on them by the pro-Islamic media than that of Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In particular, the incendiary politico has faced endless pearl-clutching and even prosecution over his position that Islam is “not […] a religion, but […] a dangerous, totalitarian ideology […] equal to communism and fascism.” Wilders’s unconventional stance has been a matter of considerable conflict on the Dutch political scene. Following the elections in 2010, the anti-Islamic firebrand’s Party for Freedom and its two conservative coalition partners issued “an ‘agree to disagree’ statement” about whether Islam was best classified as a “religion” or a “political ideology.”

Against this backdrop, we must ask whether Wilders is right in his assessment. Indeed, he is, at least partly. While Wilders’ statements to the effect that Islam “is not a religion but an ideology” sound like textbook examples of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, when, in the same interview, he adds a touch of nuance and says that Islam “is not so much a religion [as] an ideology,” his position becomes nearly indisputable: in truth, of course, Islam is both of these things but the politicization of Islam is what concerns us. In other words, Islamism: Islam as the solution to societal and world problems (specifically understood here to be the application of the Sharia Law in society).

The notion that a hard line runs between the categories “religion” and “ideology” is not substantiated from the viewpoint of history. In Ancient Greece, for instance, “[r]eligion […] impregnated each and every civic activity[ with] no separation between the sacred and the profane.” Even in the recent past, politics has often taken on the role of religion. As Jerry Z. Muller writes, “for some Jews, especially those most distant from traditional Judaism, being ‘on the Left’ has become an ersatz form of Jewish identity.” Until the secularization of the West, even the separation of church and state didn’t mean religion wasn’t an influence in society, politics, or law. Religion was. It is only the past 70 or so years, due to the unstoppable march of secularism, that a separation of religion and ideology has arisen.

As regards to Islam specifically, Wilders’ position – at least in its qualified version – has been given some credence in highly-praised work Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith. The work was hailed in The Guardian, of all places, as a “wonderful” study that contains “deep learning [and] penetrating insight,” is abundantly clear on one point: Islam is “a sociopolitical ideology as well as a faith.” Apparently more interested in honest observation than in political correctness, Mackintosh-Smith notes “the totalitarian nature of Muhammad’s ideology” and describes how, during its early period, “Islam acted as a unifying ideology empowering Arab conquest and colonialism.”

One obvious objection is worth addressing right away: if Islam is an ideology, can the same not be said of Christianity and Judaism? Let us tackle the former first: the Christian religion is not an ideology, at least not in our modern historical context. Lest it be thought that this opinion comes purely from Christian apologists, we can substantiate it by looking at scholars and other writers who are not only not religious themselves, some even having spent much of their careers criticizing Christianity. James S. Valliant, for example, writes of the New Testament:

[T]he New Testament does not explicitly spell out any political doctrine. It sets forth a code of morality, a code of right and wrong behavior, which is intended primarily for the individual. In this respect, Christianity is unlike both Islam and Judaism, which do include laws explicitly intended for political enforcement (as we are reminded regularly today in the case of Islam).

Likewise, Dr. Robert M. Price, although a mythicist regarding the historicity of Jesus, explores various possible and proposed political interpretations of the scriptural life and teachings of the New Testament. Price opens with the observation that, “[t]raditionally[,] it has not been supposed that Jesus had anything quite like what we would call political opinions.” Though such framing seems to imply that the author has set out to rebut the traditional view, he ends up virtually agreeing with it:

Since we cannot be certain of what political stance Jesus may have held, it must be sheer manipulation to choose one model and use it to command allegiance to the particular politics that one prefers. The only saying of Jesus I consider relevant to our topic is this one: “Why do you not decide for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57).

More mainstream scholars like Tom Holland and Larry Siedentop have also written how Christianity provided the consciousness and framework for human rights and liberalism to emerge. Samuel Moyn, an atheist and critical scholar, has argued that human rights have effectively become the dominion of Christian theology in political practice. What we can surmise from scholars regarding Christianity is that Christianity is not an ideology in the same way as Islam is. Although there was a historical reality of Christendom, it never had the political power as its critics assert, and doesn’t entail the same political implications as Islamism does.

What about Judaism? As suggested above, Judaism is closer to Islam than Christianity in terms of the pure degree of its inherent politicality owing to its emphasis on the Mosaic Law and halakhic commandments. Consequently, at least depending on denomination, it may well be fair to call Judaism an ideology, too. Yet compared to the ideological quality of Islam, this Judaic factor is vanishingly unimportant. In 2016, the Pew Research Center reported that a large majority of Israeli Jews wanted “[d]emocratic principles” to take precedence over halakhic commandments. More importantly, the ideological side of Judaism is guaranteed eternal insignificance outside of one tiny country; there simply isn’t an emerging Jewish majority anywhere which could turn non-Jewish political law into Jewish law. Meanwhile, Islam counts well over a billion adherents and includes, as Ibn Khaldun put it, “a religious duty” to conquer the whole world.

With the comparison to other Abrahamic faiths out of the way, we can ask what kind of ideology Islam is. The following, which is by no means an exhaustive list of the doctrine’s most significant attributes, will highlight just some of the more interesting ones.

The first and most important observation to make in this regard is that it is not, as is often claimed, an ideology “of peace.” Obviously, no peaceable belief system would include what amounts to Valkyries. One might as well call Odinism a religion of peace. One hadith has Muhammad proclaim: “Allah guarantees that He will admit the Mujahid in His Cause into Paradise if he is killed.”

The Quran has moments of the same bellicosity: “When you meet the unbelievers (in battle), smite their necks until you have crushed them.” This verse implies that under no circumstances are Muslim fighters allowed to take prisoners among “the unbelievers” until the latter “has been completely crushed.” Furthermore, the verse is taken to refer to the Battle of Badr. In that instance, the Muslims were the clear aggressors, so this passage can hardly be written off as referring only to cases when warfare is the only option – quite apart from the inhumanity of the injunction to take no prisoners. Other verses are similar in tone.

Among the passages in the Bible that make generalized statements about war, one would be hard pressed to find a similarly savage sentiment. Even outside of the New Testament’s implied pacifism, one can adduce for comparison the melancholy resignation in Ecclesiastes 3:8: “A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.” But Ecclesiastes is fatalist in its acceptance of the brutality of war as part of life rather than celebrating war as a means to an end as in the Quran and militant Islamic ideology. Furthermore, the Bible’s historicity of battles is not something that inspires believers to future conquest as is the Quran’s militaristic injunctions.

The effects of the Islamic stance regarding war are easily observed in our age, and the old baggage still seems to shine through every time armed conflict is viewed through the Islamic lens. For a striking example, one need only consider Aider Rustemov, “mufti of the spiritual administration of Muslims of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.” In August of 2022, an hour-long video was posted to the YouTube channel of Ukrainian activist Volodymyr Zolkin, in which three Russian Muslim prisoners of war who had agreed to participate were left largely alone in a mosque with a cameraman and Rustemov, who proceeded to talk to them about the Russian aggression against Ukraine from a Muslim perspective. In the introduction to the video, which, thankfully, has excellent English subtitles, a colleague of Zolkin’s explains that his team had contacted the Association of Muslims of Ukraine to arrange such a meeting. Presumably, then, Aider Rustemov, the main Mufti of Crimea, was delegated by Ukraine’s Muslim community as the best available person to explain to his Russians co-religionists why it was wrong for them to support the autocratic Russian regime in its horrific war of aggression. Bearing this in mind, what peace-loving moral guidance was Aider Rustemov able to furnish to his three interlocutors?

The arguments the cleric makes throughout the discussion boil down to the following: Russia has traditionally oppressed Muslim minorities; Ukraine is more tolerant towards Islam than Russia; the war has destroyed several mosques in Ukraine; and you could have accidentally destroyed a mosque by fighting for Russia, therefore, you could have accidentally killed a Muslim.

The mufti, who has been tasked with explaining why the Russian aggression is immoral, never once condemns aggression as such. He finds fault with the war exclusively insofar as it is damaging to Muslims, mosques, and the cause of Islam. Never once does Rustemov say any of the following: it is wrong to wage war without a just cause; a country should go to war only on the basis of its people’s democratically expressed will; the Russian military has been acting inhumanely and without regard for the welfare of civilians; killing people is generally bad. This does not seem to be an error of omission or a mere oversight on the mufti’s part. Rustemov explicitly cites Muhammad’s opinion that the destruction of the whole world would be preferable to the killing of one “believer.”

The closest Rustemov comes to a defense of peace is to repeat the old talking point that the “Greater Jihad” is an internal struggle whereas the “Lesser Jihad” is literal warfare. (Needless to say, this does not imply that “Lesser Jihad” is an illegitimate activity.) Yet even this point is not one he brings up himself: one of the soldiers raises it, and when the mufti addresses it, he begins his answer by clarifying that this doctrine does not come from Muhammad himself but is a later invention.

The mufti’s display should surprise no one considering the total absence of an Islamic just war theory deserving of that name. As leading political scientist Bassam Tibi explains it, “Any war against unbelievers, whatever its immediate ground, is morally justified. Only in this sense can one distinguish just and unjust wars in Islamic tradition.” This is fundamentally different from the rigorous criteria of Catholic Just War Theory. (While Christianity is not an ideology, its moral teachings have been applied to political philosophy.) Christian thought more broadly – as reflected in Providence, an ecumenical Protestant journal and spiritual heir to Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr – looks upon war as a last resort, and certainly never as a means to be applied whenever feasible for the end goal of world domination by Christianity. If any contrast ever deserved the adjective “stark,” it is between the Just War Theory of Christianity and the content of its contemporary heirs (like Providence) with Rustemov, Sayyid Qutb, and many other clerics who call for global jihad and Islamic domination as the fulfilment of Allah’s will.

When compared to western cultural and political values, Islam is not that friendly to the American ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For women, certainly, “liberty” is out of the question, but “life” is not valued very highly either. Thus, Muhammad is supposed to have said that to participate in holy war was, basically, the best thing a person could do. Whether one can attain “happiness” under such strict conditions is a more personal issue but even if some find happiness under the Sharia what about all of those who may dissent or disagree? The Council on Foreign Relations, concerned with religious freedom, is equally concerned that there are only a handful “Muslim-majority countries” with no laws against blasphemy – none of them in the Middle East. Meanwhile, in five such counties, blasphemy is punishable by death. If one is unhappy with Islam in these countries, the best one can do is simply remain quiet. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion is highly restricted, if not otherwise illegal.

Additionally, Islam reserves for itself supremacy over all matters of life. Political legitimacy in Islam is understood to be submission to God. This is different from the benign cosmic providence of Christianity. Saint Paul writes that Christians should obey their government, wherever they are found, rather than try to convert the government and its laws to a theological program. Islam, by contrast, sees itself and its expansion as the ordained order and will of God.

Next, let us consider what it means to understand that Islam is indeed an ideology, and a dangerous one to Europe and the broader Western world. This isn’t a concern with Islamic religious practice or theology, but with the application of Islam and Islamic law politically. In Germany, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution states the following on its website:

Islamist extremism is based on the conviction that the world religion of Islam is not only a personal or private affair, but that it should also rule social life and the political order or regulate at least part of it. This is in clear contradiction to the principles of […] the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Referring to their religion, Islamist extremists strive to wholly or partly abolish the free democratic basic order of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is why Islamist extremism falls within the remit of the German domestic intelligence services.

Yet if Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Ibn Khaldun, and James Valliant are right then this is an apt description of Islam, not merely Islamism, though Islamism is a good description of politicized Islam. Politicized Islam, in some sense, is simply the logical conclusion of Islamic theology. Hence the difficulty of having a secular division between the city of man and the city of God like in Christianity which, despite its own theologico-political problems, has always carried with it a “two-kingdoms” and “two-swords” mentality which provided for the eventual emergence of a secular civil society on one side and religious practice and devotion on the other.

The Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution draws a similar distinction between Islam and Islamism, even implying that the latter distorts the former. Nevertheless, the fact that such a distinction is made indicates the awareness of a threat posed by Islamism. The need to categorize a threatful distortion acknowledges problems, even if the acknowledgement is qualified and doesn’t get to the root of the matter: Islamism as a faithful and logical application of “Islam.”

Are the teachings attributed to Muhammad not binding for all Muslims to this day? The Council on Foreign Relations certainly leaves no room for such theological openness: “Mohammed is considered the most pious of all believers, and his actions became a model for all Muslims.” In fact, Islam’s rules are draconian and therefore contrary to the liberalism of the west. Muhammad is reported to have ordered that anyone who de-converted from Islam be killed. This passage appears in the Sahih Bukhari, which “is recognized by the overwhelming majority of the Muslim world to be one of the most authentic collections of the Sunnah of the Prophet.”

This is certainly not to say that intelligence services should monitor all mosques and Islamic activities which would be a violation of religious liberty. What it does mean is that vigilance is in order. Jamie Glazov writes that the 2017 terrorist attack by Sayfullo Saipov that killed eight people “could easily have been prevented” because the NYPD had monitored the perpetrator’s mosque for a period of time on suspicion of a terrorist threat. This surveillance, Glazov continues to note, had to be terminated after New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio caved to a leftist lobby and stripped the police department of its ability to scrutinize “all mosques and Islamic radicalization.” As the author observes, the argument behind the pressure de Blasio had faced was that “the NYPD’s surveillance of the mosque [was] discriminatory” – but against the backdrop of Islam’s ideological content, might one not just as well call it discrimination to single out neo-Nazi clubs for surveillance?

What Islam’s ideological nature also means is that we, the representatives of the Free World, should not shy away from criticizing this worldview. Joe Biden can serve as an example. The president has, albeit perhaps too reluctantly, condemned communism as a “universally failed system.” He and his ilk seem hung up on fascism, with the Commander-in-Chief having accused Donald Trump and his Republican faction of “semi-fascism.” Will Joe Biden ever have the integrity to echo, concerning the United States, former Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico’s statement that “Islam has no place in Slovakia”? One doubts that he will. And Fico is a Social Democrat and former member of the Communist Party of Slovakia; he’s further to the left than Joe Biden on just about every policy initiative.

When considering the outrage that has been directed at Geert Wilders for an observation which was at most slightly exaggerated, one cannot but wonder why the notion that Islam might be an ideology is so offensive to some people. We live in a culture where a given belief system’s status as a religion automatically makes it somewhat taboo to criticize that belief system (with the exception, of course, being Christianity). Because Islam is also a “minority” religion, the woke conditioning of respecting and even promoting everything deemed minority (non-European and non-Christian) causes consternation about wanting to critique a minority religion. To critique a minority religion is to be engaged in colonialism, imperialism, or racism!

Let us play the game of Islam’s Western apologists and quote from the Quran: “We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another.” Truly, how well can we come to know each other without freely discussing each other’s beliefs without fear of repercussion? We should seek to know what Islam entails for Western culture and civilization. What we will find may not be pleasant, but to now quote the Bible: “The truth shall set you free.”

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