Lonely Voices

A Dishonoured Prophet 

Muslims are different and they are not going to integrate into Western society--so says Trevor Phillips, chairman of the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission under Tony Blair.  Unsurprisingly, this view cuts right across the prevailing orthodoxy in Europe generally, and the UK in particular.  

To discuss this helpfully, we need to make some distinctions.  We need to be clear what sort of Muslim are we talking about.  As everybody knows, there are Muslims and Muslims, just as their are Christians and Christians.  Grant, if you would, that there are millions of Muslims in the West whome we can categorize as nominal Muslims--that is, Muslims in name only.  They do not get out the prayer mat, face Mecca and bow their faces on the ground six times a day.  Neither to they ever contemplate going on the haj.  They do not attend mosques, except for social occasions. They rarely, if ever, read the Koran.  They do not speak nor read the language of the Koran, Arabic.  They drink alcohol, ignore Ramadan, and socialise at the local pub.

Nominal Muslims have indeed integrated into Western society.  But there are Muslim immigrants who want to live as consistently as they can with Muslim practices.  They strive to follow the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad, the Koran, and wherever possible, Sharia Law.  They are not nominal Muslims, but genuine conscientious believers.  Such Muslims are far less likely to integrate into secular Western society.  On the contrary they believe and practice Islamic imperialism.
 They want to practise jihad (or holy war) upon the heathen (us).  They believe that territories and areas and buildings can be claimed for Allah.  Once so claimed, Allah and Muslims have a higher divine right to occupy and own that territory forever.

The conscientious Muslim is an imperialist for his religion--especially when he joins with other Muslims and tries to take over the local school, or playground, or housing estate so that they conform to Islamic precepts and practices.  Such Muslims will never integrate into Western society.

Trevor Phillips argued publicly in his address that to assume that inside all Muslims beats the heart of a Western libertine is the highest form of disrespect:

Addressing a meeting at the Policy Exchange think tank in Westminster on Monday, he said that Muslims “see the world differently from the rest of us”, the Times reports.   He added: “Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect”.

“Because what you are essentially saying is the fact that they behave in a different way, some of which we may not like, is because they haven’t yet seen the light. It may be that they see the world differently from the rest of us”, he explained.  “Part of the integration process is for the rest of us to grasp that people aren’t going to change their views simply because we are constantly telling them that basically they should be like us.” [Breitbart London]

President Obama and Chancellor Merkel are both nominal Christians.  They have made the grand assumption that the vast majority of Islamic believers are like them--nominal in their faith, lacking serious commitment to its respective precepts.  Obama and Merkel and Cameron are poster children for the secular West: religion is to be respected in the same way one respects one's ancestral traditions.  In fact Christianity is an ancestral tradition.  But nothing more.  And we know better, much better, these days.  We have the benefit of modern science, naturalism, materialism, and secular humanitarianism.  We are far more advanced than our forbears who maintained a quasi-superstitious belief in a God.  We know so much more these days.

The fond hope and certain belief is that when Muslims who migrate to the West have children who study in our secular schools they too will come to adopt the superior, more enlightened Western world view.  Thus, all the troubles from the current generation of migrants are temporary.  They will pass.  The migrants will become nominalists, like us, and they will accept the superior wisdom and truths of Western secularism.  So runs the received wisdom of our elites.

Trevor Phillips, however, is right.