The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the closest thing in the modern world to a caliphate. It is composed of 57 members (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority), joining voices and political heft to pursue the unitary interests of the ummah, the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. Not surprisingly, the OIC works cooperatively with the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most extensive and important Islamist organization, and one that sees itself as the vanguard of a vast, grass-roots movement — what the Brotherhood itself calls a “civilizational” movement.
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Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”
Because of that doctrinal imperative, the caliphate retains its powerful allure for believers. Nevertheless, though Islamists are on the march, it has somehow become fashionable to denigrate the notion that the global Islamic caliphate endures as a mainstream Islamic goal.
It was only a week ago that close to 2 million Muslims jammed Tahrir Square to celebrate the triumphant return to Egypt of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Khomeini-esque firebrand who pulls no punches about Islam’s goal to “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.” Yet, to take these threats seriously is now to be dismissed as a fringe lunatic, a Luddite too benighted to grasp that American principles reflect universally held truths — truths to which the ummah, deep down, is (so we are told) every bit as committed as we are.
The caliphate is an institution of imperial Islamic rule under sharia, Muslim law. Not content with empire, Islam anticipates global hegemony. Indeed, mainstream Islamic ideology declares that such hegemony is inevitable, holding to that belief every bit as sincerely as the End of History crowd holds to its conviction that its values are everyone’s values (and the Muslims are only slightly less willing to brook dissent). For Muslims, the failure of Allah’s creation to submit to the system He has prescribed is a blasphemy that cannot stand.
The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.
What really dissolved the Ottoman caliphate was not anything so contemporary as a “freedom agenda,” or a “battle for hearts and minds.” It was one of those quaint military wars, waged under the evidently outdated notion that Islamic enemies were not friends waiting to happen — that they had to be defeated, since they were not apt to be persuaded.
Another McCarthy wake up call for Americans not to hit the snooze button again.
Your article states, "Muslim's doctrinal imperative is that Islam emerge triumphant in the world", "Islamists are on the march", "Islamic hegemony is to be attained by adherence to sharia".
Winston Churchill in one of his many famous quotes also had a wake up call, "...if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves."
Thank you Andrew. Please keep fighting the good fight on this message of truth. How obvious the threat appears when you lay out the readily available evidence.
The other testament to the truth that civilizational domination is the ultimate goal is the utter lack of any organized, vigorous, and sustained opposition by other Muslims. Where are the Koranic scholars who disagree with Islamist interpretations ? Where is the global network of Muslim leaders and believers who want to stand up and offer the supposed 90% of non-jihadists an alternative vision ? If they can't intellectually defend an alternative then the Islamist reading may be correct. If they won't defend an alternative out of fear for their personal safety than they must side with us.
Isn't this partly something we've seen before. Both Lenin and Hitler were pretty explicit, before taking power, of their intentions. But no one really believed them. Once again, taking people at their own valuation seems to be denounced as inflammatory and benighted.
Just a suggestion: are we now entering a post-liberal age? For centuries, the great alternatives to Christendom were China and Islam. Both seem to be on the upswing. And the forces behind their recovery don't look like the same kind of adaptation which we saw with, say, Japan, or Russia. The terms of the conflict seem different.
This isn't something I've thought out, or would be prepared to defend against serious criticism. It's just something this post triggered.
It amazes me that liberals are so accommodating to perhaps the most illiberal religion on the planet. Islam does not offer gay rights...in fact gays would be lucky to just survive and avoid prison. Women's liberation would come to an abrupt end and freedom of choice would be stomped out. No more sexual revolution. No more secular humanism. Islam is the antithesis of old-school liberalism. You'd think they'd be a little more concerned about it.
To think of it, and this is for you lib-progressives PC appeaser types who visit NRO...all that is required is an all-star negotiating team to convince Islam of its (Islam's)collective errors...
1. Elton John: Gay entertainer; can you imagine?
2. RuPaul: Cross dresser; even better than Elton but not the star!
3. Rachel Maddow: not sure; but the master of liberal "reason".
4. Joy Behar: Jewish liberal "feminist" (kill three birds with one stone).
Good article. The illuminating Islamic phrase, "I love my death more than you love your life." is a fair evaluation for the psychologically embossed, inculcated yet sincere masses of Muslims. I am Catholic and do not love my life more than I love God. But I won't force my allegiance on anyone.
The rise in Islamic tyrany, IMO is history repeating itself vis a vis Hitler's demand for world domination. If the tennets of Islam are to be politically and socially encapsulated, if not vanquished altogether, it will take Judeo-Christian mores. Not athesists, not social-progressives ('I want what I want; I want it now and off with the rest of you.') are an aggregate paradigm for civil culture failure. Forgive me for being grateful vs. proud of my faith, but 'the gates of hell will not prevail' is written to include the Islamic politico. Catholic martyrs are not murderous martyrs. Herein lies the great civil divide between Judeo-Christian and Islam: Life actually means something you would die but not murder for.
Mr. McCarthy - As usual, a stellar column. Hey ARegularGuy, with regard to what you have written, it's too bad that even "friendly" Muslim states, as Egypt was until recently, continue to spew forth with venomous anti-American rhetoric. Also, Mr. ARegularGuy, Christians are fleeing Iraq (seems like we've made Iraq safe Sharia and unsafe for non-Muslims); and for anyone converting to Christianity in Afghanistan, a death sentence awaits. (Afghanistan is another place we are making safe for Sharia). Empirically, I have to reject your hypothesis that Mr. McCarthy is only quoting extremists.
tflavin - I have only one little quibble with what you have written. It is that you call Islam a religion. It is not a religion; it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion.
The left always seems anxious to dismiss any potential threat to America or the Western democracies out of hand.
In the case of the caliphate, it isn't as if this is some new idea and a mere theoretical possibility. These people have been working towards the exact same goal for over a thousand years, since the early conquests into South Asia, with varying degrees of success.
Even 9/11 wasn't enough to shock the left into reality - MoveOn.org and others opposed the Afghanistan invasion to go after bin Laden. Had they been in power in 1941, would they have been as quick to dismiss Pearl Harbor, cautioning us instead against "overly provocative" responses? I would not doubt it.
Re: poster Colin Ross's comments:
"Mr. McCarthy doth protest too much.
Also, Churchill considered Gandhi to be a terrorist. Good thing he lost that argument and that Mr. McCarthy will lose this one."
Mr. McCarthy won't lose his argument when he is only up against Mr. Ross's myopic wishful thinking.
I don't have anything personal against Mr. Ross. I'm just using him as an example of the people who don't agree with Mr. McCarthy's argument that Islam seeks to dominate the world. Mr. McCarthy always presents solid evidence and facts to support his arguments. His doubters don't attempt to seriously rebut McCarthy's facts. In Mr. Ross's case, he attempts to caste doubt on McCarthy by suggesting that McCarthy's quoting of Winston Churchill about the dangers of Islam is useless since Churchill was wrong about Gandhi.
True, Churchill was obviously wrong about Gandhi being a terrorist, but that has no bearing on Churchill's observations about the dangers of Islam which still seem pertinent today.
The fact that a smart man like Churchill was wrong in one area doesn't make him wrong in another. History is full of very bright people who made mistakes. One good example would be Isaac Newton. He was one of the greatest physicists in history as everybody knows. But not many people know he was also an alchemist. He spent years conducting experiments in alchemy that produced nothing but wasted time.
I like to think of clear headed thinkers like Mr. McCarthy as similar to physicists who deal in facts and logic and empirical evidence and conversely, to his critics as the confused, muddle headed alchemists.
I believe that eventually Muslims will make a choice between modernity and backwardness and that modernity will win out. Wars will be fought, but backwardness will not prevail.
One and a half billion Muslims in the world and Andrew McCarthy knows what every last one of them is thinking, and it ain’t good. So he indicts not just the bad actors merely claiming Muslim legitimacy, but he indicts the entire Muslim religion as well – the religion cherished by over a billion peaceful children of our mutual Father in Heaven.
And this is pure hypocrisy from McCarthy, and regrettably mirrors the same hypocrisy on this point of much of western (predominantly, American) Christianity.
We western Christians spent the better part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries killing each other by the millions in inter-Christian war after war. Yet we easily brush that aside as underived from and unrelated to our Christian religion because we claim such wars weren’t “religious wars”, as if the participant Christians never prayed for the victory that they were certain God surely intended for their side, or, alternatively, as if God was a disinterested impartial referee just letting the teams play.
We also say our wars weren’t religious as though it is obviously superior to war over politics or economics - as though a “non-religious” war is manifestly more laudable than a religious one. (Funny, I would have thought that to religious people a religious war, with God’s imprimatur, or at least the potential for it, would have been more approved than a non-religious war, but we Christians in the west somehow see it otherwise.)
We in the Christian west have allowed ourselves to make one catastrophic war mistake after another, with millions dead, all the time in our minds keeping our Christian religion holy and pure and without blemish, but we hypocritically don't allow modern Muslims that same privilege even when their bad actors have killed only in the thousands.
We don’t allow Muslims to use the same argument that we use, which is that the violent among them are the heretics of the religion, and not exemplars of the religion. Rather, at the first sign of an advocate of violence we readily paint Muslims and their religion with one, huge, broad brush, during and after which we wax self-congratulatory about our noble Christian heritage, bloody though it clearly was.
What was it Christ said about hypocrites and pharisaic behavior? We western Christians better go back to our Bibles and read it again, because we don't seem to have learned Christ's intended lesson.
the Islamic fundamentalists keep telling us what they're all about, and we keep pretending they don't mean it.
our DNI thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a "largely secular" organization, and our Attorney General can't guess what the 9/11 hijackers, Maj. Nidal Hassan, and the Times Square Bomber might have had in common. and there isn't one single word about Islamic fundamentalism in the Army's report on the Ft. Hood massacre.
Islam is incredibly intolerant of non-Muslims, but the Islamofascists have the complete approval of the secular/gay/feminist left. the lefties will fight to the death to make sure you can't display a cross on public land, but a mosque at Ground Zero? GREAT idea!
