Why Muslims are incapable of integrating into the West

Ever since the London bombings of July 7, liberals have naïvely wondering how Muslims who were born in Britain could hate it so much. I’ve argued that when Muslims, immigrant or native born, live in a Western country, that only increases the hostility and alienation they feel toward the West because they are now living among the enemy, and this in turn makes them revert, in an act of self-preservation, back to a stronger version of their own faith, in many cases stronger than they would have had in their native country.

Now Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch gives a fuller explanation of Muslim alienation. “Islam itself is entirely responsible for the failure of Muslims in Infidel lands to integrate,” he writes. The first factor is that, apart from jihad itself, the Koran tells Muslims to be hostile and untrusting toward non-believers:

Islam itself teaches Muslims to be suspicious of, to hate, to refuse to trust, to offer only feigned friendship to, all non-Muslims. There are passages all over the Qur’an and Hadith about this. “Take not the Christians and Jews for friends, for they are friends only with each other.” … It may be quite hard to work for Infidel employers, or to get along well with Infidel fellow-workers, if one is constantly offering only ill-concealed—or at times well-concealed—hostility. Nor does the Muslim sense of Muslim entitlement make it easy for Muslims to endure, or to endure with good grace, such an arrangement: Islam by right should dominate, Muslims should rule, it is contra naturam, against all that is right and just, for Muslims to have to accommodate themselves to non-Muslim customs and laws and ways of behaving. If they must, they should only do so temporarily—until Muslims are sufficiently powerful, which can happen long before they are an absolute majority.

After touching briefly on several more reasons why Muslims don’t get along with Westerners, Fitzgerald goes at length into a new and unexpected point. It is that the Muslims’ relationship with infidels is to exploit them, through loot, through jizyah (the crushing poll tax imposed on non-Muslims), through slavery, through the acquisition of harems (also known as “booty”), and now, in our time, through Western aid. To the extent non-Muslims have any “positive” role in the Muslim view of the world, it is to be exploited for the benefit of Muslims. Muslims see Western aid as a modern form of jizyah—$60 billion to Egypt, $9 billion to the Palestinians. These Muslim countries and entities receive vast allotments despite their anti-Westernism, as a kind of extortion. So Western aid continues the pattern of jizyah, a pay-off to avoid punishment or other trouble from a powerful or at least feared party. The proper role of non-Muslims is to serve Muslims.

What does surprise is the failure of the non-Muslim world to understand that this all fits into, and can be explained by, a coherent ideology that makes it virtually impossible for Muslims—to the extent that they remain full believers, or turn into full believers—to ever comfortably fit into, or ever accept, Western or other non-Muslim societies, mores, manners, laws, or ever to accept the idea of living in a society where the Infidel ways, the Infidel understandings, are to be permanent. This rankles Muslims. This is not right. The world belongs in the end to Allah, and to his people. It is to them that the property and women of others belongs. Not every Believer feels this, but in the canonical texts, and the tenets logically derived from them, and in the attitudes and atmospherics to which those tenets and the whole system of Islam gives rise, these views are not strange but natural and familiar.

Then Fitzgerald goes into another fascinating idea,

… the problem of the “moderate” Muslim—which is to say, the relaxed, or unobservant Muslim, the Muslim who may not act according to the tenets of Islam today, but may suddenly acquire a deep psychic need to return to Islam, for whatever reasons.

This is of course a familiar phenomenon, but Fitzgerald makes it more vivid to my mind. The way I see it is, modern life with its anomie and lack of community creates problems of identity and belonging for everyone. People have different ways of dealing with it. But when Muslims in the West have these problems, they have a ready-made, totalistic solution waiting for them—Islam, Islam to the max.

Further, Islam provides not just the cure to the disease, but its etiology. As Fitzgerald writes, when non-Muslims have personal problems, they may blame them on a variety of factors, their parents, their spouse, their health, their bad character, the stars, fate, society. But when Muslims have the problems that all flesh is heir to,

[they] have only to look to the one thing that always presents itself to be blamed: the Infidels. Their wiles, their whisperings of Shaytan, their decadence, their indifference, their whateveritis of which Infidels are guilty.

All this adds up to the conclusion, as I’ve been saying since 7/7, that if you bring Muslims into the West you are inevitably increasing jihadism against the West, in many case you’re even creating new jihadism where there wasn’t any before.

What is to be done about all this? Fitzgerald’s prognosis and recommendation are identical to my own:

There is no solution. Reducing Muslim numbers, and Muslim power, … so that those who now claim that they are “thinking of leaving” really do leave … should be the goal of Infidels, engaged only in defending themselves against the carriers of Jihad, all over the world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2005 02:33 PM | Send