Burmawi has written something important here, and the civilizational framing is correct in its essentials. But there is a layer underneath the argument that I think deserves excavation, because the re-zionization he calls for requires something more precise than confidence. It requires accuracy.
The West's current failure is not primarily a failure of nerve. It is a failure of knowledge. The people defending Islam in Western institutions are not, for the most part, cowards who know better. They are people who genuinely do not know what Islam actually claims — about its own book, its founder, its legal architecture, its theology of non-Muslim status, its structural inability to absorb honest scrutiny without the whole system dissolving. They have been given a caricature in one direction, the "religion of peace" template, and they defend it with the same confident ignorance with which others deploy the opposing caricature. Neither side has read the primary sources. Neither side has sat with Sahih Bukhari. Neither side knows what the Quran actually says about the Bible it claims to affirm, or why that claim creates a logical problem Islam has never solved.
Chesterton made the observation that the problem with Christianity in his time was not that it had been tried and found wanting, but that it had been found difficult and left untried. The same observation applies here in reverse: Islam has not been examined and found coherent. It has been declared off-limits and left unexamined. The Islamophobia charge is not a shield against hatred, it is a shield against inquiry. And the West, having accepted that shield as legitimate, has handed its most important civilizational conversation to the least equipped people in the room.
The military orders depicted in the image that prompted my earlier research this week are instructive here. Each of those brotherhoods was founded on a written rule, answerable to an external authority, and defined by a specific founding mission, most of them medical before they were military. The ribat, the nearest Islamic equivalent, was defined from its founding by the concept of perpetual frontier jihad: the obligation to hold and extend the boundary of dar al-Islam. These are not equivalent institutions that took different paths. They were built to answer different questions from the beginning. The West produced organizations that asked "who needs to be cared for?" The ribat asked "where does the frontier end?" You cannot understand the divergence of the two civilizations without understanding the divergence of those founding questions.
This is the argument my own work on Islamic origins attempts to make from the inside of the primary sources rather than from the outside of civilizational commentary. The Quran's preservation claim is auditable. The hadith transmission system has known failure modes that Islamic scholarship itself has documented. The historical record's silence about Mecca is evidentially significant in ways that most Western commentators, on both sides of this debate, have never been told. The Two Muhammads is not a polemic. It is an attempt to do what Burmawi is calling the West to do in the political sphere: look clearly, name what you see, and stop pretending the discomfort of the question is the same thing as the question being unanswerable.
The re-zionization Burmawi calls for is real and necessary. But it will not hold if it is built on civilizational confidence without civilizational knowledge. The West does not need more people who are sure Islam is the problem. It needs more people who can explain, from primary sources, why the specific claims Islam makes about its book and its founder do not survive honest historical scrutiny, and who can do that without contempt toward the people those claims have shaped for fourteen centuries. Those are not competing requirements. They are the same requirement. The confidence is hollow without the accuracy, and the accuracy without the confidence produces footnotes nobody reads.
This is the only intelligent comment here. However you are staggeringly naive if you believe that, for example, the French and British « military missions » in Africa and Asia were any more medical and any less military than the Ribats they encountered and conquered in North Africa, the Sudan etc.
Burmawi makes a catalogue of errors, not least of which is to gloss over AlQaeda’s charter, which clearly stated that its primary aim was to remove the US presence from the Arabian peninsula, primarily in the form of military bases - or Ribats, as you might call them.
One simply has to imagine how your average American would behave if there were Chinese, Iranian or Libyan military bases on mainland US soil.
I think you might be interested in my latest article - but you need to read in between the lines as far as « Western superiority » is concerned:
If I accept the author’s thesis (which I believe is broadly correct) then it follows that much of the West simply lacks the will and drive to save itself. Israel cannot do the heavy lifting for Western civilisation. There is a kind of existential envy behind the response of many western countries to Israel’s actions and her ethos.
Brilliant piece, should be compulsory reading in every establishment across the West. What will it take to wake up the hordes of useful idiots before it’s too late? In the UK, I fear it already is. We have full blown ostrich syndrome amongst our ‘dear leaders’. The only people awake are the working classes who just get labelled as racist morons.
What Mr. Burmawi's wonderful essay doesn't touch on is that the narrative informing the intelligentsia and the rising generation of leaders and staffers is not just biased: it's controlled. The mainstream media are owned by conglomerates and wealthy magnates who are projecting Islam's atrocities onto Israel, just as they threaten climate apocalypse if Europe doesn't destroy its industry, agriculture, and transportation. Presumably, the "othering" of the Jews, based on bald-faced lies, is meant to prime the West to accept successively larger attacks on Israel and on Jews generally. There's a common agenda here, but I don't know what it is.
“Jews. The one people on earth against whom no justification has ever been required. The one people history itself has already condemned in the eyes of their enemies: they deserved it, just as they “deserved” expulsion from a hundred countries across the centuries. The old blood libel needed no update…”
Phenomenal article.
In order to get my Christian Brothers’ attention I’ve started pointing out that you cannot be a Christian and condemn Israel.
The objections are the usual, “we can condemn Israel but love God’s people”, but that’s not what they are doing. They are placing every failure, every event they cannot understand, every war and all poverty at the feet of Israel. When asked how they distinguish between Israel and God’s people there is no answer. When asked how they reconcile their faith in Christ to God’s promise to curse and bless those who curse and bless Israel the only objection is that is the Old Testament God, not Christ, not the God of the New Testament. They become apostates without realizing it.
I bought your book in hardcover and audible because of this poignant piece.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that Mohammed created Islam to unite warring Bedouin tribes for success in conflicts with the Jews and Christians, the ideological unity of whom he envied? He then amped up the conquest rhetoric, upon being rejected for appropriating and revising their religion, while claiming to be their most recent prophet? The subsequent violent colonization of Jerusalem and Byzantium was followed swiftly by expansion across North Africa into the Iberian peninsula and also east into Asia? Is it a poignant irony that Islamic practices and law are rooted in cultural appropriation, colonization, gender apartheid and slavery, yet Islam is embraced globally by leftist movements that claim to oppose all of these practices?
Exactly. He gave tribal barbarism and a desire for conquest a religious veneer to make it more palatable and to unite warring tribes against the non Muslim tribe.
Israel needs to be our example if we want to survive. I couldn’t agree more. You mentioned the confusion of Westerners when they take their friendly Muslim acquaintance as representing the whole Ummah. I’ve often wondered if the increase in antisemitism in the West is in part because of the increase of Muslims in the West. It’s my understanding that the Muslim world is for the most part antisemitic. I’ve witnessed situations that have lead me to this question.
This article is gladiatorial in spirit, argument and persuasion! Most people (tragically, not all but most) recognize pure truth when they see it and that's exactly what this article is! It hits like a hard and much needed slap across the face for the demoralized & disoriented western psyche.
Clear eyed commentary, absolutely a must read. This is exactly the kind of writing that cuts to the quick. It is exactly as you call it: a collaborative attempt to collapse the West's foundational ethos. To strangle, silence and humiliate. To dominate, to indoctrinate. 9/11 itself was a convergence between deep state players and foreign actors in pursuit of Ummah and One World Governance. This convergence adapted weaponized language for its telos. Aplogetics was the first step and the word "Islamist" was concocted to muddy the moral waters. It succeeded handily as Islamism was conceptually separated from Islam (the innocent parent) at the same time as Zionist was seamlessy conflated with Jewish identity and ethnicity (the original sin). Islamism was a linguistic masterstroke. It was also a mirage. Language mirrored the hallucinatory optics of 911. Planes crashed into buildings but those buildings collapsed as a result of DEW (direct energy weapons) not mechanical impact. This explains convergence of interest between shadow government forces in the US and their putative enemies who are, in reality, collaborators. Convergence of interest explains the conversion of New York into the beginnings of a colony with the election of Mamdani. The circular logic in relation to 9/11 is as compelling as it is ironic. The psyops is firewalled from analysis by its ability to spawn cognitive dissonance. Your writing is an antidote to dissonance through its appeal to logic and moral clarity.
There are many non-Jewish people who instinctively know that Israel must be supported. I think Dan Burmawi has identified the reason behind the instinct. The article was so good I have become a paid subscriber.
Amazing piece. Greatest phrase—-Hatred is a powerful solvent. It dissolves principle faster than any ideology.——
Also loved his explaining how Israel demonstrates Western civilization and how to fight for it !!
One of your best articles yet.
Agreed.
This piece of writing should be compulsory reading in every academic institution and beyond.
Burmawi has written something important here, and the civilizational framing is correct in its essentials. But there is a layer underneath the argument that I think deserves excavation, because the re-zionization he calls for requires something more precise than confidence. It requires accuracy.
The West's current failure is not primarily a failure of nerve. It is a failure of knowledge. The people defending Islam in Western institutions are not, for the most part, cowards who know better. They are people who genuinely do not know what Islam actually claims — about its own book, its founder, its legal architecture, its theology of non-Muslim status, its structural inability to absorb honest scrutiny without the whole system dissolving. They have been given a caricature in one direction, the "religion of peace" template, and they defend it with the same confident ignorance with which others deploy the opposing caricature. Neither side has read the primary sources. Neither side has sat with Sahih Bukhari. Neither side knows what the Quran actually says about the Bible it claims to affirm, or why that claim creates a logical problem Islam has never solved.
Chesterton made the observation that the problem with Christianity in his time was not that it had been tried and found wanting, but that it had been found difficult and left untried. The same observation applies here in reverse: Islam has not been examined and found coherent. It has been declared off-limits and left unexamined. The Islamophobia charge is not a shield against hatred, it is a shield against inquiry. And the West, having accepted that shield as legitimate, has handed its most important civilizational conversation to the least equipped people in the room.
The military orders depicted in the image that prompted my earlier research this week are instructive here. Each of those brotherhoods was founded on a written rule, answerable to an external authority, and defined by a specific founding mission, most of them medical before they were military. The ribat, the nearest Islamic equivalent, was defined from its founding by the concept of perpetual frontier jihad: the obligation to hold and extend the boundary of dar al-Islam. These are not equivalent institutions that took different paths. They were built to answer different questions from the beginning. The West produced organizations that asked "who needs to be cared for?" The ribat asked "where does the frontier end?" You cannot understand the divergence of the two civilizations without understanding the divergence of those founding questions.
This is the argument my own work on Islamic origins attempts to make from the inside of the primary sources rather than from the outside of civilizational commentary. The Quran's preservation claim is auditable. The hadith transmission system has known failure modes that Islamic scholarship itself has documented. The historical record's silence about Mecca is evidentially significant in ways that most Western commentators, on both sides of this debate, have never been told. The Two Muhammads is not a polemic. It is an attempt to do what Burmawi is calling the West to do in the political sphere: look clearly, name what you see, and stop pretending the discomfort of the question is the same thing as the question being unanswerable.
The re-zionization Burmawi calls for is real and necessary. But it will not hold if it is built on civilizational confidence without civilizational knowledge. The West does not need more people who are sure Islam is the problem. It needs more people who can explain, from primary sources, why the specific claims Islam makes about its book and its founder do not survive honest historical scrutiny, and who can do that without contempt toward the people those claims have shaped for fourteen centuries. Those are not competing requirements. They are the same requirement. The confidence is hollow without the accuracy, and the accuracy without the confidence produces footnotes nobody reads.
The dinner party needs both.
I would argue that the greatest weakness of Islam is the evident inhumanity of its founder.
This is the only intelligent comment here. However you are staggeringly naive if you believe that, for example, the French and British « military missions » in Africa and Asia were any more medical and any less military than the Ribats they encountered and conquered in North Africa, the Sudan etc.
Burmawi makes a catalogue of errors, not least of which is to gloss over AlQaeda’s charter, which clearly stated that its primary aim was to remove the US presence from the Arabian peninsula, primarily in the form of military bases - or Ribats, as you might call them.
One simply has to imagine how your average American would behave if there were Chinese, Iranian or Libyan military bases on mainland US soil.
I think you might be interested in my latest article - but you need to read in between the lines as far as « Western superiority » is concerned:
https://colinalexandersmith.substack.com/p/euan-peregrine-gordon-the-strange-story-of?r=el9lj&utm_medium=ios
If I accept the author’s thesis (which I believe is broadly correct) then it follows that much of the West simply lacks the will and drive to save itself. Israel cannot do the heavy lifting for Western civilisation. There is a kind of existential envy behind the response of many western countries to Israel’s actions and her ethos.
Great line "Israel cannot do the heavy lifting for Western civilisation."
We must get off our knees and do our own heavy lifting.
Absolutely
THIS!!!!!!
Brilliant piece, should be compulsory reading in every establishment across the West. What will it take to wake up the hordes of useful idiots before it’s too late? In the UK, I fear it already is. We have full blown ostrich syndrome amongst our ‘dear leaders’. The only people awake are the working classes who just get labelled as racist morons.
What Mr. Burmawi's wonderful essay doesn't touch on is that the narrative informing the intelligentsia and the rising generation of leaders and staffers is not just biased: it's controlled. The mainstream media are owned by conglomerates and wealthy magnates who are projecting Islam's atrocities onto Israel, just as they threaten climate apocalypse if Europe doesn't destroy its industry, agriculture, and transportation. Presumably, the "othering" of the Jews, based on bald-faced lies, is meant to prime the West to accept successively larger attacks on Israel and on Jews generally. There's a common agenda here, but I don't know what it is.
Good point
“Jews. The one people on earth against whom no justification has ever been required. The one people history itself has already condemned in the eyes of their enemies: they deserved it, just as they “deserved” expulsion from a hundred countries across the centuries. The old blood libel needed no update…”
Phenomenal article.
In order to get my Christian Brothers’ attention I’ve started pointing out that you cannot be a Christian and condemn Israel.
The objections are the usual, “we can condemn Israel but love God’s people”, but that’s not what they are doing. They are placing every failure, every event they cannot understand, every war and all poverty at the feet of Israel. When asked how they distinguish between Israel and God’s people there is no answer. When asked how they reconcile their faith in Christ to God’s promise to curse and bless those who curse and bless Israel the only objection is that is the Old Testament God, not Christ, not the God of the New Testament. They become apostates without realizing it.
I bought your book in hardcover and audible because of this poignant piece.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Agreed, Drew. I am seeing that now in my own family.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that Mohammed created Islam to unite warring Bedouin tribes for success in conflicts with the Jews and Christians, the ideological unity of whom he envied? He then amped up the conquest rhetoric, upon being rejected for appropriating and revising their religion, while claiming to be their most recent prophet? The subsequent violent colonization of Jerusalem and Byzantium was followed swiftly by expansion across North Africa into the Iberian peninsula and also east into Asia? Is it a poignant irony that Islamic practices and law are rooted in cultural appropriation, colonization, gender apartheid and slavery, yet Islam is embraced globally by leftist movements that claim to oppose all of these practices?
Exactly. He gave tribal barbarism and a desire for conquest a religious veneer to make it more palatable and to unite warring tribes against the non Muslim tribe.
Danny thanks once again for your clarity: of history, of the values being defended, and of the absolute evil lurking in our midst.
Israel needs to be our example if we want to survive. I couldn’t agree more. You mentioned the confusion of Westerners when they take their friendly Muslim acquaintance as representing the whole Ummah. I’ve often wondered if the increase in antisemitism in the West is in part because of the increase of Muslims in the West. It’s my understanding that the Muslim world is for the most part antisemitic. I’ve witnessed situations that have lead me to this question.
Thank you for writing this piece. The clarity of it is a road map for where we have been and what freedom loving people have to face.
This article is gladiatorial in spirit, argument and persuasion! Most people (tragically, not all but most) recognize pure truth when they see it and that's exactly what this article is! It hits like a hard and much needed slap across the face for the demoralized & disoriented western psyche.
Clear eyed commentary, absolutely a must read. This is exactly the kind of writing that cuts to the quick. It is exactly as you call it: a collaborative attempt to collapse the West's foundational ethos. To strangle, silence and humiliate. To dominate, to indoctrinate. 9/11 itself was a convergence between deep state players and foreign actors in pursuit of Ummah and One World Governance. This convergence adapted weaponized language for its telos. Aplogetics was the first step and the word "Islamist" was concocted to muddy the moral waters. It succeeded handily as Islamism was conceptually separated from Islam (the innocent parent) at the same time as Zionist was seamlessy conflated with Jewish identity and ethnicity (the original sin). Islamism was a linguistic masterstroke. It was also a mirage. Language mirrored the hallucinatory optics of 911. Planes crashed into buildings but those buildings collapsed as a result of DEW (direct energy weapons) not mechanical impact. This explains convergence of interest between shadow government forces in the US and their putative enemies who are, in reality, collaborators. Convergence of interest explains the conversion of New York into the beginnings of a colony with the election of Mamdani. The circular logic in relation to 9/11 is as compelling as it is ironic. The psyops is firewalled from analysis by its ability to spawn cognitive dissonance. Your writing is an antidote to dissonance through its appeal to logic and moral clarity.
There are many non-Jewish people who instinctively know that Israel must be supported. I think Dan Burmawi has identified the reason behind the instinct. The article was so good I have become a paid subscriber.
This article is excellent, even breathtaking. Well done and thank you.