AYAAN HIRSI ALI: The Lie About Islam, Europe, and the Dangers We Face.
On the cover of its latest edition, The Economist promises to uncover “the truth and the lies” about “Islam in Europe.” The story it presents is, for the magazine’s readership, a reassuring one: a crisis of two extreme fringes fighting across a sensible middle. But this is a false framing that betrays the complexity of Islam in Europe it promises to untangle, just when honest understanding is urgently needed. Allow me to explain why.
The editors offer a soothing symmetry: on one side, a small minority of Islamist extremists; on the other, a small minority of far-right extremists. “Islam poses no serious danger,” declares the accompanying editorial. “But Islamism and the fear of Islam do.” Both are dangerous. Both must be resisted. In this formulation, the vast majority of Muslims and the vast majority of native Europeans are peaceable people caught between two fringes. The task of the responsible commentator is to condemn both fringes with equal force, while warning against the temptation to blame whole communities for the actions of its extremists. This is presented as the fair, balanced, and non-paranoid position, making The Economist the sober grown-up in the room who refuses to be drawn into the ugliness of either side.
Unfortunately, that symmetry does not reflect reality, and by insisting on it, The Economist puts its elite readers in a box and discourages them from looking beyond it. Consider what would have to be true for the symmetry to hold. There would have to be, on the European far right, a creedal architecture of comparable depth to Islamic scripture and tradition: a body of texts venerated by a fourth of humanity, taught in seminaries across dozens of countries, printed in hundreds of millions of copies, and read by every serious adherent of the faith as an authoritative source of guidance. There is not. The European far right has no scripture. It has memes, manifestos, a handful of self-published tracts, and a scattering of ideologues who cite one another. It has no holy book or equivalent of the Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim hadiths. It has no equivalent of the four Sunni legal schools. It has no equivalent of a 1,400-year-old exegetical tradition.
There would have to be a recruitment base of comparable size. On the Islamist side, the recruiting field is the young men of a global community of about two billion people, of whom the middle classes alone number in the hundreds of millions, all of them potentially reachable through mosques, Quran schools, satellite channels, and university Islamic societies that exist in every European city. On the far-right side, the recruiting field is a scattering of subcultures made up of football-hooligan networks, online gaming communities, and obscure political parties that have never, in any European country, produced a mass following since the 1930s. They are aggressively policed by every European state, security service, employer, and mainstream media outlet. The two recruiting fields are not remotely comparable.
Found via Rod Dreher, who tweets, “This is one of the most important essays I’ve read all year: @Ayaan ripping into The Economist for its lies about European Islam and the so-called ‘far right.'”