The security guard’s name was Mohammad Hassan Al Bayati. He was thirty years old. He had arrived in Australia by boat as an Iraqi refugee, granted protection on the standard humanitarian grounds. At his trial in the New South Wales District Court in 2019, he was convicted of taking and detaining a person with intent to obtain an advantage, of committing an act of indecency with a victim under ten years old, and of indecent assault of a person under sixteen.¹

There is nothing exceptional about this story in the inventory of what occurs in Western cities every week. A predator targeted a child, but when this story appeared on my feed today, I was reminded of the foundations Islam has established not only to increase the number of such cases, but to sanctify the act itself.

By the Book

The Doha-based Islamic portal IslamWeb, used as a primary reference by Arabic-speaking Muslims worldwide since 1998, maintains in its public archive Fatwa Number 296044, dated 24 Rajab 1436 of the Islamic calendar, which corresponds to May 12, 2015. Its title is Dawabit al-Istimta’ bi al-Saghirah: “Rules and Limits Governing Sexual Enjoyment of the Young Girl.”²

The questioner cites a passage from Bada’i al-Fawa’id, the multi-volume work of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1350), the closest student and intellectual heir of Ibn Taymiyya and one of the four most-cited Islamic jurists. The passage reproduced verbatim in the question reads:

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To understand the alliance, you have to understand the fundamental disagreement about what drives human behavior.

The Western liberal tradition, and capitalism as its economic expression, rests on the premise that ideas shape the world. This is what philosophers call idealism. A society’s values, beliefs, and convictions determine what kind of civilization it builds. Freedom produces prosperity. Dignity produces justice. A culture that glorifies conquest produces tyranny. A culture that prizes individual responsibility produces order.

From this perspective, jihadist violence is exactly what it appears to be: the product of a specific set of ideas. Ideas about divine obligation, about the duty to subjugate unbelievers, about the virtue of martyrdom.

Marxism begins from the opposite premise. For Marx and every tradition that flows from him, socialism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, ideas are not the cause of reality but its reflection. Material conditions come first: who owns what, who exploits whom, who holds power over whom. Everything else, morality, religion, law, culture, is built on top of this economic foundation, and serves to justify it. The ruling class produces the ruling ideas, in Marx’s famous formulation. Ideas are instruments of power, not independent forces.

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This is the most precise framework available for understanding one of the most consequential and most persistent mistakes that Western societies, Lebanese Christians, and anyone else who has tried to coexist with Islam on liberal terms has made, the mistake of allowing the Muslim friend, the Muslim colleague, the educated unveiled witty charming Muslim woman at the dinner party, to serve as the representative data point from which conclusions about Islam as a civilizational system are drawn.

Your Sunni Muslim friend outside his habitat is not lying to you. He is genuinely warm, genuinely tolerant, genuinely committed to the pluralism he expresses in your company. Your Shia Muslim colleague at the office is not performing a deception when she treats her non-Muslim coworkers with respect, humor, and the full human complexity that makes her someone you would call a friend. The hijabless educated woman you know, funny, irreverent, entirely comfortable in Western social environments, is not a fraud. She is exactly who she appears to be. And she is not a representation of Islam.

She is a specimen in ecological release.

What she is not carrying into your office, your dinner party, your neighborhood, what the native habitat produces and the diasporic environment suppresses, is the full weight of the theological and social system that shapes Muslim behavior when the group is the majority, when the theology is the enforcement mechanism, when the mosque and the neighborhood and the family and the state are all pointing in the same direction, and when the individual Muslim who might personally prefer tolerance is no longer protected by the ambient pluralism of a liberal society but is instead embedded in a community where deviance from theological norms carries genuine social, familial, and sometimes physical cost.

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At the most basic economic level, OPEC membership meant the quota, and the quota meant constraint. The UAE today has a production capacity of 4.85 million barrels per day. Under OPEC+, it has been producing roughly 30 percent below that ceiling, leaving nearly 1.5 million barrels per day of potential revenue sitting idle every single day. For a country whose entire development model was built on the proceeds of oil, this was not a minor inconvenience. It was a permanent tax on national ambition, paid to a cartel whose internal politics were increasingly dominated by interests that diverged from Abu Dhabi’s at every consequential turn.

But the economic constraint was almost the least of it. What OPEC membership really meant was that the UAE’s most strategic national asset was subject to a collective governance structure in which it was a minority voice. Every decision about how much to produce, when to cut, when to increase, how to respond to a supply shock, all of it required negotiation with a group of countries whose interests, geopolitical alignments, fiscal needs, and strategic priorities were not the UAE’s.

For a country that has spent the last decade systematically building the deepest possible ties with the United States, normalizing relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords, hosting American military bases, attracting Western capital and Western talent and Western institutional partnerships at every level of its economy, membership in an institution whose founding mythology was the weaponization of oil against the West was an increasingly uncomfortable identity to maintain. Because the gap between what OPEC represents and what the UAE had become strategically had grown into a chasm.

The OPEC exit is the energy expression of a identity transformation that has been unfolding across years of consequential decisions, each one moving Abu Dhabi further from the Arab collective framework it was born into and closer to the Western civilizational bloc it has chosen to inhabit.

Normalizing relations with Israel was not primarily a pragmatic calculation about economic opportunity or regional stability. It was a civilizational statement. It said that the UAE’s primary reference community was no longer the Arab world and its accumulated grievances, its shared narratives of dispossession and resistance, its consensus that the Palestinian cause was the non-negotiable litmus test of Arab political identity. It said instead that the UAE’s reference community was the club of states that prioritize economic dynamism, technological innovation, security cooperation with the West, and the realistic management of the present over the romantic politics of historical and theological grievance. Israel was not an exception to be managed within Arab identity. It was a model to be emulated, a small, technologically sophisticated, militarily capable, economically dynamic state that had built extraordinary power from limited resources in a hostile neighborhood. Abu Dhabi looked at Tel Aviv and saw a mirror of its own aspirations.

The Iran war confirmed and accelerated this trajectory. Iran struck the UAE more than any other Gulf state because the Islamic Republic understands exactly what the UAE has become. Tehran was not attacking a neighboring Arab country that happened to host American bases. It was attacking the extension of Western civilization in the Arabian desert, the outpost of the Western order it has defined itself against for forty years, the living proof that an Arab Muslim state could choose modernity, openness, integration with Israel, partnership with Washington, and the entire civilizational package that the Islamic Republic’s founding ideology exists to destroy.

The civilizational choice was made incrementally, across years of decisions. In Yemen, the systematic dismantling of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political infrastructure in the south, a campaign so threatening to Saudi Arabia’s own Muslim Brotherhood relationships that Riyadh eventually bombed a UAE-backed shipment in December 2025, making explicit that Abu Dhabi’s civilizational choice had put it at odds not just with Iran’s revolutionary Islam but with Saudi Arabia’s utilization of it. In Somalia, the UAE funded secular regional administrations in Somaliland and Puntland, and constructed counterterrorism infrastructure designed specifically to contain the Qatari-Turkish Islamic axis that was competing for influence along the Horn of Africa’s coastline. In Sudan, it backed the military structures fighting to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood’s return to power after the fall of Bashir’s thirty-year Islamic government, making strategic investments in the power structures that were keeping Muslim Brotherhood networks out of a state sitting at the junction of the Red Sea, the Sahel, and the Nile Basin.

The UAE has spent a decade using its money, its military capacity, and its bilateral relationships to dismantle Islamic political infrastructure across its strategic arc, treating the political dimension of Islam in any institutional form as a civilizational enemy rather than a fellow expression of Muslim identity deserving solidarity. Even in Europe, the UAE has fought, and continues to fight, against the ongoing Islamization of the continent at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.

OPEC was another institution that still carried the old identity. Leaving it is the deliberate removal of a label that no longer reflects what the UAE is.

Whether Muhammad existed in the precise biographical form that the tradition describes is a question for historians. Whether the Muhammad who has shaped the horizon of Islamic civilization for fourteen centuries is real is not a question at all. He is overwhelmingly, undeniably, consequentially real, more real, in the sense that matters for understanding human behavior and civilizational development, than most figures whose historical existence is beyond scholarly dispute.

He exists in the collective consciousness of a civilization of nearly two billion people with a specificity, an intimacy, and a comprehensive authority that no other founding figure of any tradition has achieved.

The tradition knows what he ate and how he slept. It knows which hand he preferred for which activities. It knows how he walked, how he smiled, how he treated his wives, how he handled the execution of his enemies, how he responded to mockery, how he negotiated with those he was in the process of defeating, how he organized the distribution of war spoils, how he prayed, how he expressed affection and how he expressed rage. This is not hagiography in the Western sense. It is a comprehensive behavioral template for human existence, preserved with the explicit theological purpose of making imitation possible and obligatory.

The companions who surrounded Muhammad absorbed this model at first hand, sat with him, fought beside him, watched him make decisions, heard his judgments, received his commands, and then carried what they had absorbed into the world with a momentum that is almost impossible to account for on purely material grounds.

Within a century of his death, the culture he founded had conquered the Arabian peninsula, destroyed the Persian Sassanid Empire, stripped the Byzantine Empire of its richest provinces, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Iberia, pushed into Central Asia, and reached the borders of the Indian subcontinent.

These conquests were understood by those who prosecuted them as direct application of Muhammad’s example. Muhammad had himself directed the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, between six hundred and nine hundred adult males executed on his order in a single day, their women and children enslaved, their property distributed among his followers. He had expelled the other Jewish tribes of Medina in campaigns combining military pressure, property confiscation, and forced exile. He had authorized the assassination of specific individuals whose mockery or opposition he found intolerable. He had organized and led raids against tens of the tribes in the peninsula. The companions who carried these precedents into the conquests were transmitting his legacy, faithfully, and specifically.

The Personal God and the Transcendent One

The standard assumption, shared by reformers who want a gentler Islam and by critics who want a simpler target, is that the Quran is the engine of Islamic civilization, that Muslims are shaped primarily by what the book says, and that the central interpretive question is therefore what the book means. This assumption produces the endless Western debate about moderate versus extremist readings of the Quran, about which verses abrogate which other verses, about whether the violent passages are context-specific or universal, about whether a sufficiently sophisticated hermeneutics can extract from the text a version of Islam compatible with liberal democratic coexistence.

The debate is beside the point. The relationship of most Muslims to the Quran across most of Islamic history has been one of memorization and recitation rather than reading and interpretation. The hafiz, the person who has memorized the entire Quran, is a figure of enormous social prestige in Muslim communities worldwide, and that prestige derives specifically from the feat of memorization rather than from any demonstrated capacity to understand, interpret, or apply the text’s content. Children in Quranic schools spend years learning to recite the Quran correctly in Arabic, which is not the native language of the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims. They learn the sounds. They learn the rhythm. They learn the ritual correctness of the recitation. They do not learn what the words mean, and this is not experienced as a deficiency. The Quran’s power is in its recitation, not in its comprehension. God speaks. The Muslim listens and repeats. Understanding is secondary to participation in the divine speech.

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America was built by exactly this class. The founders were the most formidable concentration of intellectual aristocracy that any political founding has ever produced. In his 1813 letter to John Adams, Jefferson described the natural aristocracy as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and the government of society, and that the best form of government is that which most effectively provides for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.

This intellectual aristocracy did not merely found America. It sustained it through successive generations of genuine thinkers, genuine statesmen, genuine jurists and scholars and writers who understood their role as custodians of an inheritance rather than as autonomous agents free to remake the republic according to their own theoretical preferences.

The civilization they built and sustained, imperfect, yet genuinely extraordinary in its productive, creative, and institutional achievements, was their product. Not the product of masses. Not the product of the street. Not the product of the aggrieved and the organized and the permanently resentful. The product of a class of human beings who had been formed by a specific kind of intellectual culture and who exercised their formation in the service of something larger than their own immediate interests.

Burke’s position was not elitism in the pejorative sense. It rests on the recognition that political knowledge is not the sort of thing that can be extracted from books or deduced from abstract principles. It is a craft, transmitted through tradition and apprenticeship, and available only to those who have been genuinely formed by it.

The wisdom embedded in inherited institutions accumulates slowly across generations. It cannot be reconstructed from scratch by any single generation, no matter how intelligent. The role of the natural intellectual aristocracy is precisely to serve as the living transmission belt for this accumulated wisdom.

What the Aristocracy Knew

The great civilizations of history have never been built by starting from scratch. They have been built by inheritance, by the transmission of accumulated knowledge, accumulated judgment, and accumulated institutional wisdom from one generation of genuinely formed human beings to the next, each generation adding to what it received, refining what it inherited, and passing forward something richer and more adequate to the demands of reality than what it had been given. This is what Burke meant by the partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn, not a sentimental attachment to the past but a structural observation about how civilizational knowledge actually accumulates and what happens to a civilization that severs the transmission.

The American intellectual aristocracy was the most successful example of this transmission in the modern world. What Madison received from Montesquieu and Locke and the long tradition of English constitutional thought, he refined through his own extraordinary engagement with the evidence of every previous republican experiment and passed forward in the form of a constitutional architecture so precisely calibrated to the permanent tendencies of human nature, the will to power, the corruption of faction, the tyranny of majority passion, that it has outlasted every other written constitution in history. What Lincoln received from Madison and Jefferson, the proposition that free government was possible, that a republic could sustain itself against the permanent pressure of its own internal contradictions, he tested against the most severe crisis any constitutional order has ever faced and passed forward, tempered by that testing, as something harder and more durable than what he had inherited.

The first great addition of the twentieth century was the identification of communism as a civilizational threat of a kind that the previous tradition had not encountered and for which the existing intellectual vocabulary was initially inadequate. Woodrow Wilson’s generation saw it coming but could not yet fully characterize it. It was the generation of George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan that developed the full analysis, and what they developed was a civilizational diagnosis of what communism actually was and why it was incompatible not just with American interests but with the conditions under which human beings could live as genuinely human beings.

Kennan’s containment doctrine was an argument that a political system whose foundational premises required the destruction of civil society, the abolition of private property, the elimination of all institutional space between the individual and the state, and the subordination of all human activity to the revolutionary project, was not a rival civilization with which America could indefinitely coexist but a pathology that would either be contained until it exhausted itself from within or would expand until it had consumed everything outside it.

The twentieth century’s grim laboratory confirmed Kennan’s analysis. Russia. China. Eastern Europe. Southeast Asia. Cuba. Sub-Saharan Africa. Wherever the system was implemented at scale the results were identical, mass famine, political terror, the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields, not as aberrations but as the structural and inevitable consequences.

Niebuhr added the theological and moral depth. His Christian realism, the insistence that human beings are simultaneously capable of genuine moral achievement and permanently susceptible to the corruption of power, that no political program can redeem human nature, and that the appropriate response to this condition is not utopian transformation but the construction of institutions adequate to managing human nature’s worst tendencies while enabling its best, was the intellectual framework that allowed the American intellectual aristocracy to oppose communism morally. Niebuhr could criticize American conduct in the world, and did, with considerable force, without thereby abandoning the judgment that the American constitutional order was genuinely superior to what communism offered, because his formation gave him the capacity to hold both truths simultaneously without resolving the tension between them prematurely in either direction. T

Moynihan extended the inheritance in a different direction, toward the specific institutional and social conditions that free societies require to sustain themselves, and toward the identification of the internal threats that democratic cultures generate from within even in the absence of external ideological pressure. His analysis of the breakdown of the family in urban African American communities, savagely attacked at the time as racist by people who could not distinguish between identifying a problem and endorsing the conditions that produced it, was a piece of genuine social science in the tradition of Tocqueville, the kind of work that only a person of genuine formation could produce because it required the willingness to follow evidence to conclusions that were institutionally costly and socially uncomfortable. His defense of Israel at the United Nations, Zionism is not racism, delivered in 1975 with a moral clarity and a rhetorical force that his opponents could not match, was the aristocracy’s inheritance speaking at the height of its power, the accumulated civilizational understanding of what Israel represented and what its delegitimization would mean.

The pro-Israel position of the American intellectual aristocracy was never tribal and never sentimental. It was the logical expression of the same civilizational analysis that grounded everything else they believed. Truman recognized Israel in 1948 over his own State Department’s objections because he understood what the serious liberal tradition had always understood that a liberal democracy taking root in the most hostile possible environment was not merely a Jewish achievement or an American strategic interest but a proof of concept for the principles on which the American republic itself rested. If those principles could survive and flourish surrounded by neighbors whose explicit purpose was their annihilation, the proposition that free government was possible was strengthened in a way that no domestic achievement alone could accomplish. The subsequent record, the only genuine liberal democracy in the Middle East, the most innovative economy per capita in its region, the civilian control of the military through existential wars, the Nobel laureates, the contributions to medicine and agriculture and technology, all sustained against odds that would have destroyed any less durable political culture, was not just Israel’s achievement. It was the aristocracy’s civilizational judgment vindicated in the most demanding possible test of its accuracy.

The identification of Islam’s incompatibility with Western principles was similarly not the product of post-September 11 anxiety or neoconservative ideology. It was an old layer of the inheritance, the conclusion that Jefferson drew from his conversation with the Tripolitan ambassador in 1786 and reported to Congress. What Jefferson understood, that Islam made peaceful coexistence with non-Muslim sovereignty permanently provisional and ultimately impossible, that this was not a misunderstanding to be resolved through dialogue but a structural feature of a theological system whose foundational premises required the subordination of all political authority to divine law was the a layer on which every subsequent generation of the aristocracy built its understanding of what America faced in its encounters with Islam. The Barbary Wars were not an aberration. They were the first chapter of a story whose subsequent chapters, from the Ottoman collapse through the Iranian Revolution through September 11 through October 7, have confirmed Jefferson’s founding analysis with a consistency that the aristocracy’s successors acknowledged for a very long time.

American exceptionalism was the synthesis that held all of these positions together. The conviction that America represented something genuinely extraordinary in the history of human self-governance was not nationalism in the vulgar sense. It was a structural observation about what the American founding had achieved and what sustained it, the observation that a specific combination of constitutional architecture, cultural formation, historical-theological inheritance, and institutional design had produced a political order of unusual durability, unusual capacity for self-correction, and unusual ability to extend the conditions of human freedom to an expanding population across radical changes in circumstance. Lincoln called it the last best hope of earth not as a boast but as an assessment of the stakes, the judgment that if free government failed here, having been given the most favorable conditions that history had ever provided for its success, the case for its possibility anywhere would be severely damaged.

The aristocracy that maintained this inheritance across the twentieth century, that opposed communism, defended Israel, understood Islam, and held American exceptionalism, did so because their formation had brought them, through genuine intellectual struggle, to conclusions that the evidence demanded and that genuine custodianship of the civilization required. They were not always right in their specific judgments. They were wrong about specific policies, specific interventions, specific applications of the general principles they had inherited. But they were right about the foundations, about what the civilization they were custodians of represented, what threatened it, and what defending it required. And the civilization they produced and sustained, the most extraordinary experiment in human self-governance that the world has seen, the civilization that defeated fascism and communism and built the most prosperous and most free international order in human history, is the most powerful and most honest argument for the soundness of what they knew.

The Counterfeit Aristocracy

Society, for most of recorded history, was brutally simple in its structure. At the top sat the aristocracy, and at the bottom sat the vast peasant majority, illiterate, unformed, living entirely within the horizon of immediate material survival, with no access to the accumulated wisdom of civilization and no institutional mechanism through which to acquire it. Then commerce happened, trade expanded, markets developed. A new class emerged from the peasant majority, people who had found, through the accumulation of material capital, the means to purchase the outward markers of aristocratic life without undergoing the formation that had produced them.

The aristocrat who hung a painting in his gallery was engaging in an act of genuine cultural participation, he had been formed to understand what he was looking at, to situate it within the history of artistic achievement, to experience it as an expression of the civilization whose custodian he understood himself to be. The painting meant something to him that was independent of what it signaled to others. The bourgeois who hung the same painting in his newly acquired townhouse was engaged in a fundamentally different act, an act of display, of social signaling, of purchasing the appearance of belonging to a cultural world whose inner life remained inaccessible to him because the formation that would have made it accessible was precisely what commerce could not buy. He bought the painting for spectacle. The aristocrat bought it for substance. To the casual observer the two acts were indistinguishable.

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In the early 1960s, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism dispatched a high-level delegation to New York. Their mission was to sit down with one of America’s most prestigious advertising agencies and figure out how to transform Tel Aviv into another Beirut on the Mediterranean.

At that moment, Beirut stood as the undisputed crown jewel of the Middle East, a city routinely called “the Paris of the Orient.” In the 1960s, it was the financial capital of the Arab world. Gulf oil money flowed through its sophisticated banks, making Lebanon the region’s premier financial hub. It was the medical capital, home to the finest hospitals and specialist clinics, attracting patients from across the Middle East and beyond. It was the educational capital, anchored by the American University of Beirut, an institution so renowned that it was often described as the Harvard of the Middle East. Its campus, perched on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, produced generations of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and intellectuals who would go on to shape the region.

Beirut’s streets hummed with cosmopolitan energy. Elegant French colonial architecture lined the Corniche. Nightclubs, theaters, and cafés stayed open late. Fashion houses, art galleries, and publishing firms flourished. Tourists from Europe and the Gulf mingled with local elites. Lebanon’s economy boomed. Its currency, the Lebanese pound, was one of the strongest in the developing world. Its press was the freest in the Arab region. Its universities attracted the brightest minds. For a brief, glittering window, Beirut represented what the Middle East could have been: prosperous, open, and modern.

Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, along with substantial Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and Protestant communities, had built and sustained the country’s most vital institutions. They had established the banking system, and nurtured the leading educational centers. They had built the hospitals that earned Lebanon its reputation, and cultivated a legal and political culture that allowed for greater freedom, pluralism, and economic dynamism than anywhere else in the Arab Middle East.

Wherever historic Christianity has taken root in the Middle East, whether among the Maronites of Lebanon, the Assyrians of Iraq and Syria, the Copts of Egypt, or the Armenians of the Levant, Christians have consistently built.

The Decline

While Lebanese Christians poured their energy into building, large segments of the Muslim population remained preoccupied with religiously motivated causes that had little to do with Lebanon. For many Muslims, Lebanon was never an end in itself. It was viewed as part of a larger Islamic ummah. The ultimate loyalty was not to the Lebanese republic but to the broader struggle against perceived enemies of Islam, chief among them the emerging Jewish state.

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The claim is that Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in the Qur’an, and that an entire surah, Surah Maryam, is named after her. This is held up as proof of esteem. But naming is not the same as honoring. If attaching a name were proof of sanctity, then Surah al-Baqarah (“The Cow”), Surah al-Nahl (“The Bee”), and Surah al-Naml (“The Ant”) must also be understood as exaltations of livestock, insects, and pests. Clearly, they are not. The Qur’an uses names as literary markers, not as signs of dignity. Mary’s presence in the Qur’an has one function: to serve Islam’s polemical purposes. Her virginity is affirmed not to exalt her, but to deny Christ’s divine Sonship. Her story is retold not to celebrate her, but to make her testimony endorse Muhammad’s theology. She becomes a prop in Islam’s denial of the Incarnation.

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The room laughed. Vance was joking. But jokes like this are what happens when a civilization has already passed through denial, alarm, bargaining, and resignation. When the unthinkable becomes banter at, the transformation is no longer coming. It is already here.

Europe’s Muslim population stands at roughly 46 million as of 2020, about 6 percent of the continent’s total, and it is the fastest-growing religious group on the continent. Even under a hypothetical “zero migration” scenario, Pew Research projects the share will rise to 7.4 percent by 2050 simply through higher birth rates. Under medium migration, it reaches 11.2 percent. Under high migration, it hits 14 percent, more than one in seven Europeans. In key Western European countries the figures are already far higher and climbing faster: France near 9 percent, Germany around 7 percent, the United Kingdom 6.5 percent and rising sharply in urban centers.

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Those numbers have translated directly into political muscle. In the United Kingdom’s 2024 general election, a record 25 Muslims were elected to the House of Commons. In France, 19 Muslim lawmakers entered the National Assembly in the most recent parliamentary elections, many backed by left-wing alliances that relied on Muslim voter blocs to defeat the right. Across Germany, local councils and state parliaments now routinely feature Muslim representatives. Mayors in major cities, city councilors, and even members of the European Parliament increasingly owe their seats to concentrated Muslim voting power in urban enclaves.

When a voting bloc grows large enough and cohesive enough, politicians respond to its demands. And the demands of politically mobilized Muslim communities in Europe have been consistent for years: softer stances on Islamic extremism at home, louder condemnation of Israel abroad, pressure on governments to restrict criticism of Islam, and foreign policies that tilt toward the “ummah” rather than the national interest of the host country.

The United Kingdom offers the clearest preview. Labour’s victory in 2024 was heavily influenced by Muslim voters in key marginal seats who punished the Conservatives for their support of Israel after October 7. Within months, the new government began signaling shifts: more vocal criticism of Israeli operations, relaxed rhetoric on “cease-fires” that benefit Hamas, and domestic policies that treat Islamic grievances as legitimate foreign-policy inputs. What Vance joked about was not fantasy. It was pattern recognition.

America’s Muslim population is still smaller, roughly 3.5 to 4 million today, or about 1.2 percent of the total, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Pew Research projects it will more than double to 8.1 million by 2050, reaching 2.1 percent of the population even under conservative assumptions. With continued high immigration and fertility rates well above the national average, the real figure could be higher. More important than raw numbers is concentration and organization. Muslim communities are heavily clustered in swing-state cities and suburbs: Dearborn and Hamtramck in Michigan, Minneapolis, parts of New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and growing enclaves in California, Illinois, and New York. In those areas, Muslim voters already function as decisive blocs.

We have seen the early stages. In the 2024 election cycle, pro-Palestinian Muslim organizers in Michigan delivered a humiliating protest vote against Joe Biden in the primary, forcing the White House to recalibrate its messaging on Gaza. Muslim advocacy groups like CAIR and Emgage have become fixtures in Democratic politics, extracting concessions on Israel policy, campus speech codes, and counterterrorism language. Elected Muslim officials, already numbering in the dozens at state and local levels, are pushing resolutions that equate criticism of Islam with “Islamophobia” and frame U.S. support for Israel as the root of all Middle East evil.

The Ummah First

In Islam, the ummah, the global community of believing Muslims, trumps every other allegiance. Citizenship, passports, and national borders are administrative conveniences, not sacred bonds. Nationalism is a modern Western invention to be tolerated only until the ummah regains strength. There is no Islamic equivalent of “my country, right or wrong.” There is only the House of Islam versus the House of War, and every Muslim, wherever he holds a passport, belongs first to the former. When numbers grow large enough, this hierarchy asserts itself through the ballot box.

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Look no further than the front pages of the two newspapers that serve the same Arab-Muslim community in Dearborn, Michigan, the week of November 5–14, 2025.

The English-language edition, The Arab American News, headlines the victories with the bland, assimilation-friendly phrase “HISTORIC ELECTIONS.” It celebrates Abdullah Hammoud’s landslide in Dearborn Heights, Adam Alharbi’s narrow win for mayor of Hamtramck, and Zohraan Mamdani’s breakthrough in New York. The tone is civic pride: American democracy at work, immigrants making history.

Flip to the Arabic-language. The same victories are framed with a single loaded word that changes everything: فتوحات انتخابية, “Electoral Futuhat.”

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How does a modern, educated society descend into that kind of total moral inversion? The answer is not found in the defendants alone. It is found in the society that produced them. It is found in the machine that was National Socialist Germany.

Germany in 1933 was not a primitive tribal society. It was one of the most advanced nations on earth, a powerhouse of science, philosophy, industry, and culture. Yet within months of Hitler becoming Chancellor, that society was systematically dismantled and rebuilt according to a single, all-consuming vision.

The ground had been prepared by humiliation and chaos. The Treaty of Versailles had stripped Germany of territory, colonies, military power, and dignity. The “war guilt” clause and crushing reparations were felt as a national castration. Hyperinflation in 1923 wiped out savings; people pushed wheelbarrows of worthless banknotes to buy bread. Then came the Great Depression. By 1932, six million Germans were unemployed. Weimar democracy appeared weak, corrupt, and impotent, paralyzed by coalition governments that changed every few months. Communists and Nazis battled in the streets. Many Germans concluded that liberal democracy had failed them.

Hitler offered something different. Not just jobs or revenge. He offered a new sacred order. A Volksgemeinschaft, a true national community bound by blood, race, and absolute loyalty to the Führer. He promised to restore German pride, to make the Volk whole again, to create a society where every individual knew his place in a grand, historic struggle. And he delivered results fast.

Once in power, the Nazis moved with ruthless efficiency. The Reichstag Fire gave the pretext for emergency decrees. The Enabling Act of March 1933 allowed Hitler to rule by decree. Political parties were banned. Trade unions were smashed and replaced by the German Labor Front. This was Gleichschaltung, the “coordination” of the entire society. Every institution, every association, every aspect of public and private life had to be brought into line with the Nazi worldview.

The press was taken over. Editors received daily instructions from Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Books were burned in public squares. Universities were purged. Jewish professors and “politically unreliable” academics were driven out. The curriculum was rewritten to emphasize racial biology, military history, and loyalty to the regime. Children learned that the highest virtue was obedience to the Führer and the purity of the German blood.

Youth organizations became the frontline of this transformation. The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls swallowed up almost all other groups. Membership became effectively compulsory by 1936. Boys were drilled in military discipline, physical fitness, and Nazi ideology from age ten. They marched, camped, learned to shoot, and absorbed endless lessons on racial superiority and the eternal Jewish enemy. Their evenings and weekends no longer belonged to their families or churches, they belonged to the state. Girls were trained to become healthy mothers of the master race, their bodies and futures claimed for demographic warfare.

Even leisure was coordinated. The “Strength Through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude) program gave workers subsidized vacations, cruises, theater tickets, sports events, and cultural outings that had once been the preserve of the middle class. It was brilliant social control disguised as benevolence. Workers felt the regime was giving them a better life. Factories organized group exercises and cultural programs. The message was constant: You are part of something greater. Your individual desires are secondary to the Volk.

At the center of it all stood the Führerprinzip, the leadership principle. Hitler’s word was law. Personal loyalty to him superseded all previous legal, moral, or religious authority. Civil servants, soldiers, judges, and doctors swore oaths directly to the Führer. Dissent became not just political opposition but treason against the German people themselves.

The racial hierarchy gave ordinary Germans a sense of elevation and purpose. Jews were gradually excluded from the national community. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped them of citizenship. Aryanization followed, the systematic transfer of Jewish property into German hands. Jewish businesses were boycotted, then forced to sell at a fraction of their value. Neighbors, colleagues, and opportunists bought department stores, factories, homes, and artworks for pennies. Many ordinary Germans became direct beneficiaries of the plunder. It wasn’t just the SS or the party elite who profited. The system made complicity profitable and normal.

Denunciation became a civic duty. Block wardens and party members watched their neighbors. A careless joke about Hitler, a complaint about shortages, friendship with a Jew, any of it could bring the Gestapo to your door. Fear mixed with enthusiasm. People reported on each other not always out of ideological fervor, but because it was safer, or because it brought small advantages.

Churches were pressured. Some Protestant leaders formed the “German Christians” movement, trying to Nazify Christianity itself with Aryan Jesus and swastika altars. Catholics signed concordats but still faced harassment. Many clergy and believers compromised rather than resist openly.

By the late 1930s, the transformation was nearly complete. Private life had been colonized. The individual was redefined as a cell in the body of the Volk. Conscience was collectivized. What the Führer and the party declared good became good. What they declared necessary became necessary. The ideology was total. It reached into bedrooms, classrooms, workplaces, and holidays. It told Germans who they were, who their enemies were, and what their destiny demanded.

This was the society that produced the men Douglas Kelley studied in those twenty-two cells. Ambitious doctors who sterilized the “unfit.” Lawyers who drafted the racial laws. Administrators who organized the logistics of exclusion and later extermination. Teachers who taught children to hate. They were not aberrations. They were the logical product of a system that demanded the whole man, body, mind, and soul, and gave him in return a sense of meaning, belonging, and power he had never known in the chaos of Weimar.

The Machinery Reborn

The men in those twenty-two cells did not wake up one morning and decide to build gas chambers. They were shaped. Year after year, the system reached into their schools, their workplaces, their homes, their consciences, and replaced whatever was there with itself. That is how ordinary people become the instruments of extraordinary evil. Not because they are monsters, but because the ideology leaves no room for anything else.

The same machinery exists today. Different uniforms, different language, different flags. But the architecture is identical: one total vision that claims the whole person, body, mind, family, law, future, and soul, and offers in return belonging, purpose, and power. It does not ask for part of your life. It demands all of it. And once it gets it, the individual conscience disappears. What the system declares good becomes good. What it declares necessary becomes necessary. Dissent is not disagreement. It is betrayal of the sacred order.

Look at how it operates.

It begins with the child. Just as the Hitler Youth swallowed German boys and girls by age ten, turning their after-school hours into drills of loyalty and racial doctrine, this system takes children even earlier. Five times a day the call to prayer echoes. In mosques across the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the growing enclaves in Europe and America, boys as young as six sit on the floor rocking back and forth, memorizing Arabic verses they do not understand, learning that the highest virtue is submission and that the greatest honor is to defend the faith with their lives if called. They are taught the stories of the Prophet’s battles, the duty of jihad, the eternal enmity toward those who reject the message. The curriculum is not optional. The family that resists is shamed. The child who questions is corrected, harshly. By the time they are teenagers, the pattern is set: loyalty to the community of believers above family, above country, above self.

It moves into law. National Socialism replaced the old German legal code with Nazi justice, racial, political, absolute. Here, the replacement is older and more complete. Sharia is not a personal moral guide. It is the law of God, unchangeable, covering every detail of existence: what you eat, how you marry, how you inherit, how you punish, how you wage war, how you treat outsiders. Inheritance favors sons over daughters. Apostasy is death. Blasphemy is death. A woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s. The state that implements this is not “extreme.” It is simply applying the blueprint. The countries that soften it are the ones compromising with modernity, not the ones being true to the system. The judges, the imams, the police who enforce it are not sadists. They are men doing their duty, exactly like the German administrators who signed the papers sending trainloads east.

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But that’s just the latest. Add to this the three Americans killed in an Islamic State ambush in Palmyra, Syria; fifteen Jews murdered in a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia; and five men arrested in Germany for plotting an Islamic vehicle-ramming attack on a Christmas market in Bavaria. The locations shift, the casualties vary, the headlines evolve, but the pattern endures: a relentless torrent of Islamic terrorism. Yet modern governments cloak it under the amorphous term “terrorism,” as if the label alone suffices to explain or confront the threat.

Nothing in modern political vocabulary is as hollow, overused, and under-defined as the word “terrorism.” It is a category that pretends to illuminate but actually conceals. A bureaucratic convenience that functions as a moral anesthetic. A word that allows governments to condemn violence without naming the worldview that produced it.

Before the twentieth century, political violence was described by ideology, not abstraction. When an anarchist bombed a government building, he was not labeled by his method; he was labeled by his worldview. When Bolsheviks assassinated ministers or fascists marched on Rome, their acts were understood as extensions of their ideologies. The actor and the doctrine were inseparable.

That clarity collapsed precisely when Islamic movements began to articulate a global political-theological project in the late twentieth century. Rather than naming the ideology that animated this violence, Western governments and institutions retreated into vagueness. They invented a category, “terrorism,” that could condemn the act without confronting its doctrinal source.

There were geopolitical reasons for this. Arab alliances mattered. Oil mattered. Diplomatic sensitivity mattered. Washington did not want to alienate allies across the Muslim world, and Europe had already entangled itself in complex migration and energy dependencies. Naming the ideology would trigger political crises; avoiding it offered stability.

Thus emerged the linguistic escape hatch: “militants,” “radicals,” “violent extremists,” and the catch-all “terrorists.” These terms gave the illusion of moral clarity while actually erasing the intellectual roots of the phenomenon.

Unlike anarchism, communism, fascism, or Baathism, all of which were dissected with academic and political precision, Islam was quarantined from ideological scrutiny. The academy shielded it under cultural relativism. Governments shielded it under diplomatic necessity. Media institutions shielded it under the fear of being accused of bigotry. So instead of studying Islam political theology, Western institutions studied: poverty, alienation, unemployment, integration, trauma, mental health, colonial grievances, and identity crises. Everything except the one thing the perpetrators consistently cite: their theology.

This is how “terrorism” became a category without an author, a word that condemns violence while laundering responsibility. It treats the violent actor as a generic creature rather than a doctrinal agent. It places all violent non-state actors into one moral bucket regardless of motivation, history, or worldview.

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Eighteenth-century America was overwhelmingly Christian, with debates over religion centered on denominational rivalries, Protestants versus Catholics, Anglicans versus dissenters, and the desire to avoid the state-sponsored persecutions that had plagued Europe. Islam, distant and exotic, registered primarily through reports of the Ottoman Empire or the Barbary Pirates, who enslaved American sailors in North Africa. But these encounters came after the Constitution’s ratification in 1788.

Jefferson advocated for religious tolerance, but he had no idea that the religion of the “Mahometans” was a political ideology. Benjamin Franklin, in his writings, expressed openness to “all sects” but derided “Mahometans” in satirical pieces, seeing Islam as incompatible with enlightened governance. John Adams, while acknowledging Muslims as potential citizens, later labeled Muhammad an “impostor” in his son’s writings, reflecting a broader Founder skepticism toward non-Biblical faiths.

None foresaw Islam as a global ideological force.

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Islam functions as a political ideology shielded by religious claims, exploiting Western freedoms to advance goals antithetical to them. The Founders designed safeguards against domestic threats, but they did not envision a system where religion serves as a veil for ideological warfare. The Constitution’s protections, intended for benign faiths, inadvertently provide cover for entities that blend theology with totalitarianism.

In essence, the document’s framers built a framework for a nation of diverse Christians and deists, not one contending with a system that views democracy as kufr (disbelief). This gap demands reevaluation when considering deterrence against an ideology that threats to erase the Western Civilization as we know it.

The Inefficiency of the Current laws

In the last two weeks alone, the United States has been hit by a string of Islamic terrorist attacks. On March 1, in Austin, Texas, a Muslim man opened fire in a crowded bar on Sixth Street, killing three people and wounding 14 others while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and wearing a hoodie emblazoned with “Property of Allah.” Just six days later, on March 7, two men hurled homemade bombs at an anti-Islam protest outside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s residence, aiming to kill demonstrators; one of the attackers later told NYPD he wanted to avenge insults to the Prophet. Then, on March 12, the very day I’m writing this, a Muslim man rammed his truck into Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, crashing through the doors and into a hallway before being fatally shot by security in a confrontation that injured 31 people, including children from the attached preschool. And just hours earlier at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, a former National Guard member with prior ISIS convictions shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire in an ROTC classroom, killing one and wounding two before students subdued and killed him.

There is a serious problem in the structure of U.S. counterterrorism statutes, which emphasize individual accountability while ignoring the collective networks that sustain jihad. The current tools implemented by the U.S. government are reactive and narrowly focused, punishing the perpetrator after the fact without imposing broader consequences on enablers, family members, communities, or ideological supporters.

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Or do they represent interpretive borders, where one reading of sacred texts emphasizes peace while another promotes militancy?

Perhaps they are merely modern developments, constructs of the 20th century designed to differentiate between a benign faith and its politicized offshoots?

To begin, it is essential to clarify what these borders are not.

Islam and Islamism are not separate sects.

Sunni Islamists adhere to Sunni Islam, drawing from the same books and venerating the same historical figures. Similarly, Shia Islamists remain firmly within Shia traditions, honoring the Imams and following established Shia scholarship.

There is no standalone “Islamist sect” with its own distinct theology or institutions; both groups operate within the same mosques, reference the same canonical texts, and trace their lineages back to Muhammad.

Nor can these borders be chalked up to differing interpretations of Islam’s foundational sources.

The notion that Islamism represents a “twisted” or radical reading of an otherwise peaceful religion ignores the continuity of Islamic practice and doctrine.

Both self-described moderate Muslims and Islamists uphold and sanctify the identical interpretations that have defined the faith for centuries. The Islam of the Salaf, the “pious predecessors” from the time of Muhammad and his immediate successors, remains the Islam practiced today by believers across the ideological spectrum.

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