Learning from Islam’s advance

Wednesday, 1st November 2006

David Selbourne surveys the West’s setbacks in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and warns that we are underestimating the coherence of the war against the infidel

In addition, most Western governments appear to have forgotten simple political truths which the Islamic challenge should have reinforced. Among these truths is that the principles of the free society require toleration of the tolerant, but demand that intolerance be shown towards those who not only reject such free society’s values but look forward to the day when they are brought down. If civil society is to be upheld and protected from pluralist dissolution, the obligations of the citizen, whether indigenous or incomer, must also be accorded parity of status with claims of rights and be enforced, in the interests of all.

Whether it is now too late to remedy the situation (before varieties of neofascism take greater hold of the Western body politic) is an open question. But it is certainly time to recognise, salute and learn from the political and moral strengths of Islam, which has been a force in the world for more than a thousand years longer than has the United States. And without regard to party, liberal democracies must repair their internal defences so that the lives of such societies may be prolonged.

For it is clear that, despite the calls of the American hard Right to turn Muslim cities into ‘parking lots’ or to ‘glass’, this war will primarily have to be fought politically, with more brain than brawn, against what is now the world’s most powerful, and advancing, ideological movement.

David Selbourne’s The Losing Battle with Islam was published in the United States in November 2005.