Jay Currie

I am reading a wonderful book called How the Scots Invented the Modern World. It is, more or less, a history of the Scotish Enlightenment. David Hume, Adam Smith, the invention of the liberal imagination.

The Scottish Enlightenment occured in reaction to something and that something was the strict Presbyterianism inflicted upon much of Scotland by John Knox and the rule of the Kirk. This was the Scots Reformation and a nasty piece of work it was.

The billions of words spilt in the attempt to understand 9/11 tend to wander away from the nature of Islam as fast as the writers’ little legs will carry them. It is neither pc nor culturally sensitive to point out that the ideology of Salafism bears a striking resemblance to the strictures of the Calvinist ideology which underlay Knox’s Reformation. Both purport to be a return to the unadulterated roots of their respective religions. And both were primarily directed at the misguided within their own faith.

The Scottish Enlightenment demanded a degree of toleration of divergent religious opinion and secular activity which would have been unthinkable fifty years previously. It did so as much for practical reasons as doctrinal ones: the fact was that the Presbyterian focus on the next world ensured that Scotland remained the poorest, least progressive nation in Europe.

The rememberance of 9/11 has degenerated into partisan bickering over television shows fueled by Bush derangement and conspiracy mongering on the left and a complete unwillingness on the right to admit that the Iraq war had no endgame planning. Fun if you like that sort of thing.

What is lost in this partisan baying is the reality of the actual danger to which 9/11 should have, but apparently did not, alerted the West. While it is great fun to mock the al Qaeda plans for the Caliphate and the loonier pronoucements of the boys in the caves. It is less fun to realize that Iraq has been on the terror bandwagon for decades and is now nuking up. And even less fun than that is the realization that the West may well lose far more than a couple of large buildings and three thousand people to the ongoing immigration pressure from Islamic nations. Here’s how Martin Amis describes the essential drive of the Islamists:

The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.
the observer

Islam in its Salafi version is not the much touted religion of peace: it is a religion of war without end. Which we are not supposed to talk about. We are not supposed to talk about the homegrown terrorists in Spain or London or Toronto. We can’t because there is simply no way those terrorists can be contained within the rigid walls of the West’s commitment to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity. Nor is it possible to speak – in polite society or the mainstream media – about the nature of the incitement offered in Salafi dominated mosques.

And, as we cannot talk about these sorts of things without being labelled racist or Islamophobic (a position which as I learn more of Islam I am inclined to hold) it is simply out of the question to actually come to grips with what might be done to reduce the threat Salafism poses to the West.

So, five years on, it turns out that the snooze button silenced the 9/11 alarm. Until it rings again..perhaps a little louder.

The Scottish Enlightenment was invented out of nothing by some deeply gifted teachers and their pupils. It took place in a world where blasphemy was punishable by death and where the threat of violence underlay the flights of philosophy. It is not obvious that an Islamic Enlightenment is in the offing. Nor is it obvious that the teachers and thinkers who might create such an Enlightenment would be allowed to survive.

While we must hope that Islam is able to heal itself and drive out the haters, the terrorists and the thugs who have seemingly taken much of it over, 9/11 should have taught us that pious hope is not enough.

Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyya (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia – barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals, and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to ‘exterminate’ Islam – and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example. As Bernard Lewis puts it in The Crisis of Islam

‘This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur’an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, ‘the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men’ (Qur’an, CXIV, 4, 5).
the observer

For Scotland the great seducer was England. Wealthy, more, in the argot of the times Latitudinarian in religious outlook, engaged in the world, inventive: England was the temptress which lead Scotland away from the dead world of Calvinism and into modernity.

It is just possible that, if they stop making bone headed blunders and stopped appologizing to and coddling their own Muslims, America could perform the same great service for the Islamic world. The root cause of the planes hitting the towers was a profound longing for an imaginary Islamic past which OBL and his Salafi cohorts feed into and an even greater fear of the future.

It was not by accident that jets hit a quarter mile high building: what could be more emblematic of a future which the Islamists believe can have no room for Islam as they conceive it. And they are right. The future, indeed the modern world, has no room at all for such people. But it has all the room in the world for the products of the necessary Islamic Enlightenment.

Until that Enlightenment happens, for its own preservation, the West has to recognize how dangerous all Muslims have the potential to be. Certainly that is unfair, certainly it is not how we would like to run a modern. pluralistic society; but the reality is that for the last two decades virtually all terror directed agains the West has come from the Islamists and we have every right to recognize that any Muslim may be – overtly or covertly – Islamist in sympathy and therefore potentially terrorist in action.

This need for vigilance is a tragedy; but today’s date reminds us of the price a lack of vigilance exacts.