France: The Canary in the Coalmine?
Facing the consequences of creating a 'community within the community'
For those of us who love France and her people, the past week was painful in the extreme. Large parts of the country went up in flames, with seemingly no end in sight to the nightly cycle of mayhem.
It is worth considering the broader context of what is happening. You see, there have been plenty of recent events that might have prompted some people in France to take to the streets. To cite just a few instances from a painfully long list:
· The Charlie Hebdo Shooting, 7 January 2015, Paris, 12 people killed, 12 injured.
· The Paris Terror Attacks, 13 November 2015, 130 killed, hundreds injured.
· The Nice Truck Attack, 14 July 2016, 86 people killed, hundreds injured.
Even though the people who perpetrated these attacks came from their own communities, those who are currently torching France evidently could not muster up the energy to make their disapproval known on the streets back then. One wonders why not? After all, far more people died in these events than one young man who tried to speed away from the police. Is the answer perhaps to be found in the fact that the ‘Muslim Street’ of France do not view those who died in the terror attacks listed as ‘their people’?
I believe that the issue of identity is crucial to understanding what is happening. Over the course of decades France has imported an entire group of people whose primary identification is with Islam. People who are being taught by their religion that they are ‘the best of all people’ (Qur’an 3:110), that those who reject Islam are to be subjugated (Qur’an 9:29) and that the world is divided into the Dar al-Islam (the realm of Islam) and the Dar al-Harb (the realm of the sword). Ultimately, those holding to these values have not integrated, precisely because they did not want to! As doing so would have been seen as a betrayal of their religion. At most you can say that they live in France as a kind of ‘community within a community’.
Hence the visceral anger when secular France dares to employ force to enforce its laws. This also explains the deeply theological undercurrent to the current riots, taking place against the backdrop of endless cries of Allahu-Akbar. It is seen by some as a perfect opportunity to declare war on the French state and to carve out territory for the House of Islam. Sure, things will probably die down after a while, but the reality is that there will be more bits of France that will now be regarded as ‘no-go zones’ from the perspective of law enforcement. At the next flare-up, no doubt more real estate will be added to this list.
In his masterwork ‘The Clash of Civilizations and the Coming World Order’, Samuel Huntingdon famously pointed out that ‘Islam has bloody borders’. In other words, wherever an Islamic entity borders another civilization there is bound to be armed conflict. The problem from the perspective of the French state is that these ‘bloody borders’ have now been installed right on the edges of all their major cities. Officially Muslims make up 9% of the French population (illegal immigration means that the actual figure could be as high as 13%). With high birth rates and essentially zero immigration enforcement at the EU’s external borders, this figure is bound to increase exponentially over the coming decades.
The key question that stares the people of France in the face is, if 9% (or 13%) of the population reject the French state, and is capable of bringing it to its knees, what will things look like when it reaches 20 or 30%? The rest of Europe will also have to seriously grapple with the question of whether France’s present is their future. More positively, how can what is tearing France apart be avoided in other parts of the world?
There are obviously no easy answers to these questions. In fact, some answers cannot be implemented without significant political realignments that will, for example, translate into far stricter border enforcement. The one answer that we can all be involved in is to point out the supremacist nature of Islamic teaching and in doing all that we can to undermine Islam as a belief system. Simply put, if people cease to believe in Islam, they also cease to cling to the concepts of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. I will explore some ways in which Islam, and the ideas that it spawns, can be challenged in future posts.
For a detailed explanation of the ways in which Qur’anic teaching often translates into supremacism and isolationism, please see my book ‘Nothing to do with Islam? Investigating the West’s Most Dangerous Blind Spot’.
Kind regards,
Peter
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