Read Part 1 here.
Islam, too, is about controlling the behavior of others because humans are considered incapable of regulating their own emotions. The linguistic and behavioral prescriptions of Wokeness—which force potential offenders into constant vigilance and anticipatory self-censorship—are the verbal equivalent of the visual veil in the Umma. Work on the self and the development of a stable, resilient subject would be the royal road not only for the woke left, but also within Islam.
Work on the self and the development of a stable, resilient subject would be the royal road not only for the woke left, but also within Islam.
In its current form, however, it can be incompatible with the pluralistic values of a free, secular society. The Qur’an, in large parts, is a document of group-based misanthropy.
It is scarcely pluralistic:
“Fight against those who believe not in Allah nor in the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor follow the religion of truth, from among those who were given the Scripture”. (Sūrah 9:29, Pickthall)
Sūrah 4:89 instructs the faithful on dealing with non-Muslims:
“They wish ye would disbelieve as they disbelieve, that ye might be alike. So take not from among them friends until they flee in the way of Allah; but if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them”. (Pickthall)
The Qur’anic hatred of the kāfir is not marginal, but obsessively repeated and elaborately central to the Islamic revelation. Unbelievers “are under the curse of Allah” (Sūrah 2:89), they are “more vile than cattle” (Sūrah 8:55), and should be avoided—or, better, eliminated. If their eradication cannot occur in this world, eternal punishment awaits them in the Hereafter. When describing these punishments, the Qur’anic imagination repeatedly reaches baroque extremes:
“Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our signs—We will drive them into the Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through, We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment”. (Sūrah 4:56, Pickthall)
As in the torturer’s textbook, careful attention is paid to preserving the victim’s capacity to feel pain. The sadistic relish with which the torments are described is unmistakable. Many of the excruciating punishments detailed in the Qur’an read like excerpts from Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom:
“For those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them; boiling water will be poured upon their heads, melting their insides and their skins; and for them are hooked iron rods”. (Sūrah 22:19–21, Pickthall)
On women, Sūrah 4:34 states:
“Men are the protectors and maintainers of women … As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, and scourge them”. (Pickthall)
At least, through modest covering, a Muslim woman can exempt herself from the default status of female prey, as Sūrah 33:59 notes:
“O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them … so that they will be recognized and not annoyed”. (Pickthall)
Interreligious relations fare no better. Those People of the Scripture—Jews and Christians—who obstinately refuse conversion to Allah’s true faith are transformed by Him into “apes and swine and idolaters” (Sūrah 5:60, Pickthall).
One could go on. Philanthropy is not a feature of Islam’s holy scripture, which as the direct word of Allah stands above all worldly constitutions for every good Muslim. Hatred of Jews, gays, and women, and the obsessive fury directed at “unbelievers,” would result in the immediate banning of any literalist Islamic political party in a modern secular state for being unconstitutional.
Philanthropy is not a feature of Islam’s holy scripture, which as the direct word of Allah stands above all worldly constitutions for every good Muslim.
Moreover, the fact that the so-called religion of peace lacks an authoritative body to interpret, moderate, historicize, or (ideally) strike these injunctions as incompatible with the spirit of Islam has dramatic consequences. Any provincial mufti may issue fatwas at will, and any self-styled holy warrior may invoke them in committing murder. Because Islam lacks a clear clerical hierarchy, there is no recognized authority defining who may issue a fatwa and who may not.
Certainly, peaceful Muslim practice is possible and occurs, but it cannot rely on definitive theological sanction, interpretation or canonization. The aggressive variant in the Qur’an is therefore constantly derivable. The sharp distinction between peaceful Islam and militant Islamism is fragile.
As the sociologist and long-time German TV correspondent in Algiers, Samuel Schirmbeck observes, “Islam does not have its God under control”. As long as every believer can interpret the 1,400-year-old text literally, without any authoritative adaptation to the achievements of modernity and human rights, Islam will not free itself from Islamism.
Perpetually Offended and Politically Staggered: The Talibanization of the Left
The West cannot do Islam’s—or the Muslims’ suffering under its rule—work of Enlightenment for them. That does not mean, however, that it could not at least refrain domestically from collaborating with the most reactionary hardliners among Islamic associations, thereby sabotaging the emancipation efforts of a liberal Islam.
The West cannot do Islam’s—or the Muslims’ suffering under its rule—work of Enlightenment for them.
The woke left has not just discovered in the pleasure of cancel culture the statue-toppling impulses of the Taliban. It has also surrendered its former “dialectical” insights to a binary, Manichean division of the world into Good and Evil. Increasingly, it is incapable of tolerating the pain caused by two conflicting thoughts coexisting in its own mind. This lack of tolerance for ambiguity finds a mirror, not coincidentally, in the Islamic distinction between haram and halal. The ideological demands for purity among the formerly progressive, now anti-Enlightenment left are as strict as those of fanatic Islamists.
In the uncritical embrace of those identified as the weary and burdened of this world, today’s left surrenders without a fight what its forebears once fought for: equality, sexual self-determination, freedom from compelled adherence to religious prescriptions. “One can observe”, notes Pascal Bruckner in horror, “how former priest-eaters kneel before the asses of the Islamists”.
Why is the left incapable of recognizing that its distant love for others is, in fact, hatred of one’s neighbors? Why does it fail to see that its fight for the supposedly discriminated foreign is actually a deeply neurotic, national-masochistic rejection of the familiar? How can it miss the fact that the cheers of “Refugees welcome!”, flowers, and plush toys in the Munich main train station in the summer of 2015 function, from a mass-psychological standpoint, as mirror images of the deportation trains that carried Jews to Auschwitz seventy-five years earlier—the German guilty soul looking for absolution in the unquestioning embrace of anything that is decisively un-German?
And why does the left overlook the tragic irony that this attempt at self-purification, through retroactive anti-fascism expressed as all-encompassing xenophilia, is executed on people whose religiously tinged culture bears a striking resemblance to that of the Nazis the left seeks to overcome? In matters of family structure, the oppression of women, antisemitism, homophobia, the strict division of insider versus outsider, and expansionist imperialism, Islam and National Socialism operate like twins.
In matters of family structure, the oppression of women, antisemitism, homophobia, the strict division of insider versus outsider, and expansionist imperialism, Islam and National Socialism operate like twins.
And we have not even touched on the recent fraternization of parts of the German left—under the flag of pro-Palestinian activism, but motivated in practice by anti-Israel sentiment—with jihadists. This occurred in the wake of the worst pogrom against Jews since the Shoah, on 7 October 2023, carried out by Palestinians. How could this unholy and oppressive alliance with Islamo-fascists come to pass?
Psychopathology of the Everyday Allah
Perhaps it is because cultural continuity is never simply inherited—it must be actively cultivated. Knowledge, emancipatory progress, and cultural capital must, like the improbable and demanding form of government that is democracy, be continuously fought for. Otherwise, they are at risk of collapse. Islam, therefore, must undergo its own Enlightenment.
The left, in turn, must stop refusing to educate itself and lingering in the fortress-like enclosures of ideological self-limitation. In particular, it must not hand over the keys to the city gates to Muslim migrants with the bland solemnity of ceremonial trust. The assumption that a few leaflets on Western values, pedagogically guided visits to concentration camps, crash courses in democracy promotion, and violence-prevention training will dissolve the culturally incompatible patterns of their home cultures into cosmopolitan acquiescence is simply naïve.
The neo-colonial attempt of Islam to transform today’s Europe—from Dār al-Harb into Dār al-Islām via demographic expansion—can be resisted. This ambition of a demographic takeover through a “birth jihad” is by no means expressed only by TikTok Islamists, but also openly by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—for example, when he calls on Turks living in Europe: “Have five children, not three, because you are Europe’s future“.
We can handle Islamic hostility toward the West. What we cannot handle is the self-hatred of our own elites, who are setting out to form a phalanx of Islamo-leftist appeasement. In truth, both phenomena can now only be grasped in psychopathological terms.
This is why the latest news from Wokeistan—already amplified by the rise of an identitarian right in the U.S. and the looming specter of an anti-woke backlash—sounds ever more like reports from an asylum. As for dominant Islam, which regrettably is increasingly fundamentalist, we have come to expect nothing less.
Tolerance as a Pact with Reaction
We should support liberal, dissident forces within the Muslim world to the fullest extent—by helping them counter the Islamization of modernity with the modernization of Islam. Yet these forces feel abandoned, even betrayed and sold out, by the European left. As early as 2009, the Algerian feminist Wassyla Tamzali was already lamenting, as just one voice among many, the “aberrations … of culturalist and differentialist viewpoints” among the “intellectuals, activists, the left” in Europe, who tend to “embrace ideas or movements united by their legitimization of anti-feminism”.
We should support liberal, dissident forces within the Muslim world to the fullest extent—by helping them counter the Islamization of modernity with the modernization of Islam.
European tolerance has become cultural relativism. A progressive idea has been turned into a pact with reaction. In 2009, Tamzali said:
“In France, in Spain, in Italy, sexist treatment of women is tolerated when demanded and practiced by groups coming from outside”.
Such confusion of perversity with diversity denies feminists in the Islamic world solidarity in their struggle for an intra-Muslim “1968”. Tamzali sarcastically notes that her culturally sensitive Western intellectual friends would prefer if she appeared before them veiled.
For decades, critics of Islam from the Muslim world living in Germany have warned of the dangers of such misunderstood tolerance: political scientist and commentator Hamed Abdel-Samad, psychologist Ahmad Mansour, Syrian sociologist Bassam Tibi, Turkish-German sociologist Neçla Kelek, lawyer Seyran Ateş, among many others. Soheib Bencheikh, the former Grand Mufti of Marseille, has been warning for over thirty years about Islam’s inherently extremist forces. He calls for a desacralization of Muslim law and its reinterpretation using the tools of twenty-first-century reason.
Soheib Bencheikh, the former Grand Mufti of Marseille, has been warning for over thirty years about Islam’s inherently extremist forces.
Even before 9/11, he noted:
“The extent of barbarism committed in the name of Islam must raise serious questions about the social status of Islam … This barbarism reveals above all the immense discrepancy between the need to live one’s faith today and an outdated theology that was elaborated in a time that is no longer ours”.
Why are such voices of secularism and intra-Muslim Enlightenment not heard and amplified by Western leftist intellectuals? When the ultra-reactionary thinking they so passionately oppose does not come from a booted neo-Nazi in Saxony, but from Ankara, Kabul, Tehran or Cairo, one can reliably count on the failure of anti-colonial Third-World romantics.
How did a formerly critical political movement come to exhaust itself in drawing moral nectar from mastering a rehearsed jargon of non-discrimination and denouncing any thought deviating from the pure doctrine as heretical? Does the left not see that its worldview implies erratically scattered tribal societies, confined in solipsistic towers of subjectivity, characterized by communicatively unbridgeable differences from the clan in the neighboring tower?
Does it further not see that such neo-tribalism—where only each subgroup may represent itself—is the natural enemy of genuine inclusion and pluralism? How can it fail to notice that the long-overcome essentialist idea—that biology, origin, faith and sexuality are inescapable destinies—is being rehabilitated?
The anti-racist left thereby gives new life to a time-honored trope of classical racism. Celebrating roots is apparently no longer the exclusive domain of the right. How bigoted must one’s thinking be to seek anti-imperialist freedom from discrimination by turning to fascist theocrats?
How bigoted must one’s thinking be to seek anti-imperialist freedom from discrimination by turning to fascist theocrats?
Where does such stubborn refusal to think come from? Is it the lack of experience of war, the guilt-compensating need for outrage of a generation raised in comfort? Or is it simply the inability to meet the demands of societal freedom with one’s own personal strength, preferring instead to retreat into the behavioral security of a mental North Korea?
Since We Are Not Beings of Light…
To overcome the status quo of an unenlightened Islam on the one hand, and an anti-Enlightenment left that imagines itself progressive on the other, a moral and intellectual accounting is needed. If Europe wakes up, it would be best for it to emerge as a Europe of resilient openness to the world. Currently, however, the danger is of a harsh awakening.
This is not only because of those who oppose the Islamization of Europe for the wrong reasons—not because they are enthusiastic pluralists, but because they wish to counter the Muslim monoculture with a nationalist monoculture that is equally hostile to Enlightenment. In that scenario, Beelzebub would have chased the devil out.
If the left and the eroding bourgeois center do not finally recall the liberal legacy of the Siècle des Lumières, this Beelzebub—whether it goes by AfD, Rassemblement National, or Reform UK (its name is, after all, legion)—will likely be needed. But its swift exorcism in turn is far from guaranteed. Better, then, would be reflection. Within this, self-analysis should replace navel-gazing.
One need not be merciless toward oneself—perhaps just rigorous. Why not start by scrutinizing one’s own authoritarianism when trying to be anti-authoritarian? Why not sharpen the eye to one’s own “Nazi-ness” when relentlessly detecting Nazi tendencies in others? Why not acknowledge that there’s a lot of “Fa” in “Antifa”?
Why not acknowledge that there’s a lot of “Fa” in “Antifa”?
It would be helpful to cultivate a new kind of thoughtfulness above the ruins of one’s moral self-aggrandizement. This thoughtfulness would reckon with one’s own susceptibility to error and seduction, without collapsing into penitential quietism. Such reflection is by no means to be confused with cleverness—especially not with the widespread cunning-as-smartness, which is far worse than mere stupidity could ever be.
This thoughtfulness would not deliriously chase the New Human. It would understand that to do so would be to build the gulags for the others who must be “re-educated”. It would not attempt to save the world, knowing that such attempts inevitably turn it into hell. It would remain skeptical of the idealistic hands-on mentality of history-making, recognizing that the only lesson history reliably teaches is that no lessons are ever learned.
It would meet dissenting opinions with confidence, rather than letting fleeting psychophysical agitation seize the reins. As my opening quote from Robin Skynner shows, this has the great advantage of sparing the world from becoming a repressive hell of controlling others’ behavior.
This new thoughtfulness would be mindful that it originates from a non–being-of-light. It is therefore neither surprised nor overrun when the inner rogue asserts itself. Rather, clarity about the germination of these swamp flowers within the self empowers a strategy of perpetual non-perversion.
“Human greatness”, writes Ernst Jünger, “must always be fought for. It triumphs by conquering the attack of the base within one’s own breast”. The battlefield of the struggle between Good and Evil is the heart itself.
