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I’m glad to hear that none of David’s friends want to make him live under Sharia law. They sound like thoroughly decent fellows. And I readily concede that most Muslims living in the West are happy to just get along and make their way without imposing their religion on others. Many, I suspect, may have only a loose cultural affiliation with their religion, as with so-called nominal Christians, and others who identify as Muslim may know little about the tenets of their faith.

No problem so far. The problem is that there are others who have closely studied, and attempt to follow, the Quran and the accounts of Muhammad’s sayings and doings – the Hadith, which make up by far the greatest proportion of the Islamic scriptures - including the violent texts. Not all the Hadith collections are regarded as reliable. However those that are deemed authentic, such as the collections of Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, are part of normative Islam, binding on all Muslims.

The reality is that there are a multitude of invocations to violence and cruel punishments in these texts, and calls for Muslims to fight to subjugate other religions and make Islam supreme universally. One position that all Muslims hold in common is that Muhammad is the supreme exemplar of conduct – and he was involved in scores of military campaigns to spread the faith. I should say this does not mean that the texts say everyone should be forced to convert to Islam. Indeed, there are periods in the early expansion of Islam when wholesale conversion was deliberately avoided so as to preserve subjected populations as cash cows to be milked by discriminatory taxation.

One often hears this appeal to someone’s friends in order to support some generalization about a large class of people. A very weak form, perhaps, of the ‘argumentum ad populum’, the argumentative fallacy that asserts the truth of something because a lot of people believe it.

I recall an episode of the ABC Q & A program a few years ago when one of the panelists, John Stackhouse, an American scholar of world religions, provoked gasps of incredulity when he stated matter-of-factly that ‘Islam is not a religion of peace. That is just the fact of the matter’. Another panelist, the well-known human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson rushed in ‘…. bbbut all of my Muslim friends are very peaceable’.

To get a sense of the kind of problems that can arise when Islam buts up against Western liberalism we need to turn to Western Europe, most of which have substantially larger Muslim populations than Australia, and the United States even more so where the proportion is tiny (around one percent).

Consider some the things that have been going on in Britain, starting with what happened to the historian Tom Holland when he produced a film for Channel 4 based on his book ‘In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire’. The book is about the origins and early history of Islam, and questions the orthodox account, contending that the Quran only came together in its present form in the 8th or 9th century.

Here is Holland’s account of what happened when the documentary went to air:

‘Just a few minutes into the broadcast, my Twitter stream was going up in smoke. By the time the show ended, the death threats were coming in thick and fast—and not just against me but against my family as well. Channel 4 was also deluged with protests. A private screening scheduled for assorted movers and shakers had to be cancelled after the police warned that they couldn’t guarantee the security of those attending the event.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-i-questioned-the-history-of-muhammad-1420821462

Is David going to maintain that this behaviour has nothing whatever to do with the canonical texts that prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy? This, of course, is just one of numerous examples of people being threatened for querying or ridiculing the faith, threats that have burgeoned since the fatwa on Salmon Rushdie back in 1989, reaching a crescendo with the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015. Nothing to do with religious tenets, according to David.

How can there be any objective, genuinely critical scholarship on Islam in this climate? The ability to question religions is one of the important achievements of the Enlightenment, and one that Christianity, with rare exceptions, has learned to live with. Indeed the veracity of biblical history has been subjected to close and critical scrutiny since at least the early 19th century.

Maybe David thinks this is not a big deal, that we should just try to be more ‘polite’ and suck up this contraction in basic freedoms (Tom Holland was very polite, by the way). The problem is that this is part of a concerted effort to make Islam a closed system, where defection (apostasy, another death penalty infraction) becomes even more difficult and where Islam is effectively walled off from criticism.

Some governments in Europe have effectively begun to validate restrictions on criticism of Islam by conflating ‘Islamophobia’ with racism and seeking to extend the ambit of anti-discrimination laws and subjectively defined ‘hate speech’ laws to cover it. Even the European Court of Human Rights is getting into the act.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13376/european-court-human-wrongs

Some of the biggest losers from this are people born into a Muslim background but who decide to defect from hit, like the British-Iranian secularist Mariam Namazie, a co-founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She has been repeatedly threatened and no-platformed on university campuses and elsewhere. At the same time, according to a report prepared by Namazie’s organisation, extreme Islamist groups are given free reign on campuses throughout the UK. Check out this video of the brutal treatment meted out to her by Islamists and ‘progressives’ when she tried to speak at Goldsmith’s College, part of the University of London.
https://youtu.be/kl0sI47tVgY

On the matter of Sharia, David’s friends may not want to impose it, but plenty of others do. In Britain a study by the Policy Exchange, the largest such study of Muslim opinion in the UK ever undertaken, found that 43 percent supported ‘the introduction of Sharia Law’ and just 22 percent were opposed.
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2016/12/over-40-percent-of-uk-muslims-support-aspects-of-sharia-law

Not a majority, admittedly, but a very substantial minority – and, as always, it is the noisy, activist minority that is likely to prevail over a docile majority. Hence we see the proliferation in the UK of Sharia councils – according to the Civitas think tank around 85 such councils are now operating.

According to a report by this group:

‘Sharia courts operating in Britain may be handing down rulings that are inappropriate to this country because they are linked to elements in Islamic law that are seriously out of step with trends in Western legislation that derive from the values of the Enlightenment and are inherent in modern codes of human rights. Sharia rulings contain great potential for controversy and may involve acts contrary to UK legal norms and human rights legislation’

… and the big losers from this are Muslim women. The report goes on:

‘Here are some examples: a Muslim woman may not under any circumstances marry a non-Muslim man unless he converts to Islam; such a woman’s children will be separated from her until she marries a Muslim man; polygamous marriage (i.e. two to four wives) is considered legal… a husband has conjugal rights over his wife, and she should normally answer his summons to have sex (but she cannot summon him for the same reason); a woman may not stay with her husband if he leaves Islam; non-Muslims may be deprived of their share in an inheritance… a wife has no property rights in the event of divorce…’
http://civitas.org.uk/press/sharia-courts-should-not-be-recognized-under-the-arbitration-act/

These councils have crept in under the watch of both Convervative and Labour Party governments.

Then there is the effective decriminalization of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), now in epidemic proportions (the NHS is reporting new cases at the rate of fifteen per day). Despite this, and the fact it has been a criminal offence since 1985, to date there have only been a handful of successful prosecutions. Why? That is a very good question, for which no satisfactory answer has yet been put forward. It probably though has something to do with the almost total lack of interest from feminist and human rights groups, who in some cases think that to interfere would be, in the words of Germaine Greer, ‘culturally arrogant’.

There is a great deal more to be said about what has been going on in Britain, not least the overwhelming failure to act to stop the proliferation at multiple locations around the country of racially and religiously motivated sexual enslavement gangs (euphemistically termed ‘grooming gangs’) targeting young white girls from disadvantaged and dysfunctional families, as well as some Sikhs. This went on for decades, ignored by the media until a report in 2012 by the Times journalist Andrew Norfolk on events in the northern town of Rotherham. If you want a primer on all this check out this speech by Norfolk https://youtu.be/O7P7ih1GuuQ
and this press conference by Professor Alexis Jay, the chief social worker of Scotland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WjE67vEU24&feature=youtu.be

There was an almost complete failure of all arms of the state – police, social services, local councils, politicians - to address these problems (in some cases the police were actually complicit). Why? Because of the identity of the overwhelmingly Muslim perpetrators. In a rare moment of honestly the former MP for Rotherham Dennis McShane admitted that as a ‘Guardian reading liberal leftie’ he shied away from the issue, telling the BBC:

‘I think there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat if I may put it like that.’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11059643/Denis-MacShane-I-was-too-much-of-a-liberal-leftie-and-should-have-done-more-to-investigate-child-abuse.html

McShane’s successor as MP for Rotherham Sarah Champion wrote an article in 2017 following the exposure of another gang in Newcastle that called on her colleagues to frankly face up to the nature of the problem. For this, she was forced to resign as Labour’s shadow equalities minister after making a grovelling apology for ‘causing offence’ https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/08/labour-mp-sarah-champion-resigns-over-grooming-gang-piece-sun

Champion was denounced by another Labour MP Naz Shah (Bradford West) for writing an article that ‘is not only irresponsible but is also setting a very dangerous precedent and must be challenged.’ Shah, who is notorious for her blatantly anti-Semitic tweets, shared (and liked) a tweet that said:

'those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity!'
https://twitter.com/GaiusCa1igu1a/status/1017079071442956288

So was she disciplined for this? Not likely – she was actually promoted to Sarah Champion’s former post of shadow equalities minister. As the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up. The debasement of this once great party under Corbyn is a historic tragedy. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson must be spinning in their graves!

I contend that what we are seeing here is a shocking erosion of societal norms that will take on catastrophic proportions if it is allowed to go on unimpeded.

I won’t start on France, which is experiencing its own travails. I will simply leave you with the words of the outgoing Interior Minister in Emmanuel Macron’s government Gérard Collomb made in an interview with the weekly magazine L’Express. After touring the inner cities of Marseille, Toulouse and Paris, he said:

‘The situation is very difficult and the phrase ‘Reconquering the Republic’ is apt because in these districts it’s the law of the strongest that reigns, that of the drug dealers and radical Islamists, which has supplanted the Republic.’
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/france-is-fracturing-but-macron-remains-in-denial/

And consider this account of the transformation of the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, where both the Bataclan and Brussels terror attacks were incubated, by the cultural anthropologist and war photographer Teun Voeten who watched it happen as a resident for nine years:

‘Over nine years, I witnessed the neighbourhood become increasingly intolerant. Alcohol became unavailable in most shops and supermarkets; I heard stories of fanatics at the Comte des Flandres metro station who pressured women to wear the veil; Islamic bookshops proliferated, and it became impossible to buy a decent newspaper. With an unemployment rate of 30 percent, the streets were eerily empty until late in the morning. Nowhere was there a bar or café where white, black and brown people would mingle. Instead, I witnessed petty crime, aggression, and frustrated youths who spat at our girlfriends and called them ‘filthy whores.’ If you made a remark, you were inevitably scolded and called a racist. There used to be Jewish shops on Chaussée de Gand, but these were terrorized by gangs of young kids and most closed their doors around 2008. Openly gay people were routinely intimidated, and also packed up their bags.’
https://www.politico.eu/article/molenbeek-broke-my-heart-radicalization-suburb-brussels-gentrification/

Far from being vibrant and diverse, Voeten is describing what can only be considered a fearful and repressed monoculture.

In the article Voeten describes a ‘culture of denial’ by Belgium’s progressive elite that stymies debate about the reality of what is happening. Those who do speak out are treated in the familiar way by the ideologues and defenders of identity politics:

‘Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.’

This is a civilizational challenge. David likes to accuse others of being ‘ahistorical’, and cites a litany of alleged Western villainy as somehow explaining some of these pathologies. However for someone so ready to charge others with ignorance of historical context he seems to have a surprisingly short time horizon, confining himself pretty much to the 19th and 20th centuries. Anyone would think that conquest, enslavement, colonialism were an exclusively Western pathology.

The quest for Islamic conquest has been going on for 1400 years. The Crusades, for example, often portrayed as pure unprovoked Western Christian villainy (and there were, of course, some awful atrocities) without reference to that all important historical context that they were preceded by four centuries of unremitting Islamic conquest that subjugated the Arabian peninsula and then what used to be the centre of gravity of the Christian world, the Middle East and North Africa, vanquishing the Zoroastrian empire in Persia, extending later into Europe with the conquest of Spain, the Balkans and – most bloody of all – the Indian subcontinent. The Crusades were a belated and limited pushback.

If these processes are allowed to roll on unimpeded, we are likely to see a transformation in European civilization that is profound, irrevocable and very much for the worse. This must serve as a warning for other nations, such as Australia and United States, that are much less affected at this time.