"Almost one in three Danes would ban Islam."
That figure from Weekendavisen has been met in some quarters with outrage. With head-shaking. With questions about how so many Danes could have become "intolerant".
So I have spent much of the day thinking about how I might put this in perspective - so that even Svend Brinkmann and his comrades might understand it.
Because perhaps it is not primarily about aversion to Muslims or to people, but about a growing sense that there exists a real and unresolved tension between Islam as a social order and civilisational model and the secular, liberal democracy that Denmark and Europe are built upon. A tension that is rarely spoken of clearly and honestly.
What I describe here is not a wish and not a proposal - but a structural difference between systems, as it appears historically and theologically.
So let me try to turn the question on its head, so the asymmetry becomes visible.
"If Islam gained political power in a Western country - what would happen to other religions?"
When Islam exists as a substantial minority in Western countries, coexistence is the norm. Religious freedom is accepted, and loyalty to the host country is emphasised. This is both understandable, expected and legitimate.
But Islam in the classical sense is not only a personal faith. It is also a social order, a legal system and a political framework. Religion, law and state are not clearly separated. Therefore a shift occurs when Islam moves from being a minority to having sovereign political power.
Not necessarily out of ill will, but because the system is designed, orchestrated and structured that way.
According to classical Islamic law, Islam is the overarching norm, while other religions can be tolerated, but never made equal. Non-Muslims are traditionally classified as dhimmi - protected. They have the right to live and to practise their faith privately, and in many cases they have historically been able to retain existing churches and synagogues. But this tolerance has always been bound to restrictions. Public mission has been forbidden and associated with punishment, criticism of Islam has been unacceptable and associated with punishment, new religious buildings have been forbidden to erect or severely limited, and full political rights have not been available. To this are added special taxes and a clear legal and cultural subordination.
It is important to understand that this is not religious freedom as it is understood in modern Western societies. It is tolerance entirely and absolutely on the terms of power.
The decisive test is not whether we can live peacefully together in Denmark today - but whether those same freedoms would exist if the power relationship were reversed.
The most decisive - and often least discussed - point is the right to leave a religion. In classical Islamic law, apostasy is punishable. In some traditions with death, in others with imprisonment, loss of rights or permanent social exclusion. This means that while one can live as a Christian or Jew under Islamic rule, a Muslim cannot freely choose to no longer be Muslim. An order in which one can enter a religion but not freely leave it does not contain - in any recognisable version for a Westerner - genuine religious freedom.
Polytheistic religious practice has historically had no protected status and has been forbidden - and in certain periods and places, even today, associated with the death penalty. This is not polemic, but theologically and historically documentable.
What is described here are not extreme positions or deviations, but classical Islamic jurisprudence as it has been understood in the mainstream throughout history.
When Danes look towards countries and societies where Islam has had full political power - historically or today - they therefore do not see a system that resembles what they themselves live in. They see a society where religion and state are interwoven, and where freedom is conditional on adaptation and submission of the whole life.
This is where many hear the question "would you ban Islam?" in a different way than it is often portrayed.
Because they do not hear it as a question about prayer, faith or private life, but as a question about which system ultimately has precedence if cultural, legal and value-based conflicts become sharp enough.
And since many have experienced an increasing Islamification of their own societies - often strangely sanctioned and supported by their own politicians - there lies an underlying "no, we don't want more of that here, I can see where it ends..." beneath the question.
When they are simultaneously met by - presumably well-meaning, but uninformed and naive - politicians and opinion-makers who say that "Islam is a religion like all others", many experience that a crucial step is being skipped.
Because that is precisely what is being discussed - whether Islam is ONLY a religion, OR whether it is also a political and legal project with its own norms for law, authority and community.
Which it, for anyone with open eyes, curiosity and knowledge of Islam's history, nature and structure, obviously is.
One can deeply disagree with the desire for a ban. I actually do myself. But if one does not understand what lies behind the figure, one also does not understand the unease and uncertainty that drives it forward.
Here. And in the rest of Europe.
And perhaps that is why the question keeps returning.
Not because the Danes have become more intolerant, but because many experience that their society lacks clear boundaries and an honest language for talking about them.
The asymmetry consists in the fact that one system demands tolerance as principle, while the other accepts tolerance as exception.
And of course because many experience that their politicians believe one can negotiate - over coffee dates and nudging - with a 1,400-year-old, time-tested, totalitarian, civilisationally strong hierarchical system that has been rolled out globally, anchored in an interweaving of theology, law and power, and which has neither arisen nor survived by bending, but by maintaining its inner order, authority and normativity across time, places and cultures - as if it were a modern policy project that can be adjusted with workshops, bullshit-lingo and process tools...
One cannot.
❤️🔥🪽
Good evening, friends.
