A step deeper into the Incompatible.
Two buildings stand side by side in every city now, all the way through Europe.
In one, it is said every Sunday that God became Man.
In the other, it is said every Friday that God never became Man - and that whoever says so has committed the worst sin there is.
The two buildings often stand less than a hundred metres from each other. And almost no Europeans think about what that actually means.
Because we have taught ourselves that it means nothing. That it is two interpretations of the same basic substance. That it is two paths to the same mountain top, two names for the same God, two interpretations of a common foundation. And the Man in the Television and his many Experts have taught us that we are bad people if we think differently about it.
It is a nice thought.
It is just not true.
And it is costing us more than most understand or will admit.
Let me try to unfold it, so it stands clear, and as many as possible can follow.
Christianity says a particular thing about Man. It says that we are created in God's image. It does not mean this as a metaphor. But as reality. It says that Logos, the creative Word that bears the whole of creation - the universe - has stepped into flesh in Christ. And it says that Man can therefore be the place where the divine takes up residence. We are not only creatures. We are channels. We are bearers. Athanasius, one of the first church fathers, said it simply and quite boldly -
God became man, so that man could become God.
This is not heresy. It is Christianity's centre. It is what Paul meant when he wrote - "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Human dignity in the West comes directly from this thought. The individual human being as inviolable, as autonomous, as bearer of something holy and divine, comes from us taking the Logos-doctrine seriously for a thousand years.
Islam says something else. It says that Allah is absolutely transcendent. That is, totally separated from creation, and that any mixing between Creator and created is what they call 'shirk'.
Shirk is the only sin the Quran says Allah will never(!) forgive. So this is not some small obscure technical detail. It is the foundation of the whole system.
Man in Islam is 'abd, Allah's slave or servant. The word Abdullah, carried as a name by multi-millions, literally means Allah's slave - and is in a way the whole anthropology in one word. The relationship is master-servant, not father-son. And the word Islam literally means 'submission' - again this is not a linguistic curiosity, it is the whole point. The highest honour for a human being is to be an obedient slave.
And the Quran is not vague about Christianity. It mentions it by name and rejects its core claims quite explicitly. In sura five verses 72 and 73 it says that they are unbelievers who say that God is the Messiah, Mary's son. In sura four verse 171 they are warned against saying "three" about God. In sura nine verse 30 it says directly: "The Christians say the Messiah is Allah's son. May Allah destroy them, how they are deluded." None of this is later interpretation or reformulation. It is the text itself. It is the Quran, which for a Muslim is Allah's revealed infallible word, that identifies Christianity's centre as the worst form of shirk.
It means something.
Especially the more believing a person is.
It means that the two traditions cannot both be taken seriously and live fully lived side by side on top of each other. For if a Christian believes what he says about Christ, he commits in the Muslim's eyes every single day the worst sin there is. If a Muslim believes what he says about Allah, he must see his Christian neighbour as walking in the deepest error a human being can stand in. Not because he does not like his neighbour. It is not a question of ill will or lack of humanity. It is the architecture of faith itself. It is what it necessarily demands of him.
And it goes both ways. Orthodox Christianity has its own exclusivity. Jesus says "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me." For the one who stands in his Christian tradition, Islam is also an error, one that denies Christ as what he is. Both traditions have absolute claims about Truth that directly contradict each other at the core.
It is in another and fine word - a bilateral problem.
And one that has asymmetric civilisational consequences, because the two traditions have different structures for - and especially answers to - what follows from such an assessment.
The classical Islamic answer was the dhimmi system. Christians and Jews had a special status in Islamic law, because they had received revelation before Muhammad. They could live in Muslim societies, but not as equals. They paid jizya, a special tax. They subordinated themselves in public. They were not allowed to proselytise. They were not allowed to build new churches or repair the old ones without permission. In strict periods they were required to wear special clothing that made them recognisable as second class. It is coexistence, but it is structural subordination. Muslim civilisation offered survival, but not equality.
Polytheists did not get the same gesture. They stood outside the system and were faced with the choice between converting or being killed. This applied to the idolaters of the Arabian Peninsula during the early conquests, and it applied to Hindus in the centuries when Muslim rulers moved into India.
This is what that order offers, when taken fully seriously.
And here we come to the core of what we stand in the middle of.
When two traditions make mutually exclusive absolute truth claims, there are basically only four possible ways forward.
ONE IS CONVERSION. This means one tradition gives up its core claims and becomes the other.
THE SECOND IS SUBORDINATION. This means one tradition lives within the other's space as second class.
THE THIRD IS SEPARATION. This means two traditions live in different territories, as civilisations beside each other, not as an inner relationship in one society.
THE FOURTH IS SECULARISATION. This means that AT LEAST one tradition gives up its core claims in practice, while it keeps them on paper, and becomes a tradition one no longer takes quite seriously.
The West chose the fourth way.
I described and explained why, a few days ago, will link to it below.
We secularised our own tradition, which has meant we no longer quite believe what we say we believe. We may go to church at Christmas and weddings, but the vast majority have disconnected themselves from Christianity saying anything binding whatsoever about reality.
That we did this created an enormous negotiating advantage internally within our own tradition. It meant that we could live with people who believed something different, because our own faith was no longer an organising force. We invented what we call neutral public space. We invented what we call religion as private matter. We invented what we call equality before the law, where law does not mean God's law, but a human-made legal construction one can change. And it worked as long as the foundation beneath us - whether we knew it or not - was shaped by Christianity's worldview and assumptions about Man and Reality.
And then we assumed in the last part of last century, that Islam would follow the same path when it arrived in greater numbers.
This is the error we stand in.
We assumed that Islam, when it came into Europe in multi-millions, would secularise itself, because that was what we did, and because we confuse our own historical path with a universal law of development.
It was a formidable confusion.
For Islam is not constructed as private faith. It is constructed as complete civilisational model and social order. The law is not an appendix to Islam. The law IS Islam. And the modern Western assumption, that religion is a personal opinion that lives beside a neutral juridical space, makes no sense within Islamic understanding. To imagine this is not merely a category error. It is to say to Islam - become a private faith.
And that is in its essence to ask it to cease being itself.
It cannot, naturally. And the more Muslim a Muslim is, the less he can accept it. Not because it is a sign of radicalisation in abstract sense, but because it is the tradition finding itself again. It is a return to what Islam says about itself, when it is allowed to say it.
And it is allowed more and more, the more demographic and institutional weight it gets.
We are discovering now, slowly, that our neutrality only worked as long as everyone living in it accepted its premise. We are discovering that it is not a universal truth, but a historical negotiation, that rested on a Christian foundation beneath it. A foundation we have simultaneously disconnected ourselves from - and which many do not understand or do not acknowledge or acknowledge the connection to in their inner arrangement. They would like to have the fruit from it - but preferably without the faith and origin.
We therefore stand in a vacuum, and are only discovering now, that neutrality without foundation is nothing. And has no resistance or weight. What it is, is an opening and an invitation to takeover.
And openings are always filled.
And let it be completely clear, that nothing of what I write here, is something I write against Muslims.
It must be clear, and it must stand plainly, that the great majority of Muslims live peacefully with Christians every day. Many Muslims have adopted the Western liberal framework and interpret - in the private - their tradition through it. Many Muslims are good neighbours, good colleagues, good people. None of that, is what I am talking about.
I am talking about the structure.
I am talking about what that order is, which Islam is, when it is allowed to be itself fully. And I am talking about what happens, when a civilisation that has forgotten what it itself is, meets a civilisation that has not forgotten what it is.
And I am talking about a specific error. Not an error the Muslims have committed by coming here, but an error we have committed by assuming that our own secular model was something other than what it was.
It was not a universal truth. It was a Christian civilisation's late phase, which went over to forgetting its own root. And our misinterpretation shows now with all reasonable clarity, that one cannot stand on a foundation one has forgotten exists. A foundation which at the time of writing is about to collapse beneath us.
This leads me to say this.
The only way back, if one is the sort who wishes, that the Western world and its particular arrangement, view of man and worldview should endure - is not through politics.
It is through remembrance. To remember what it was we stood in. What we stood on. Where it was we came from. What it was, that in its time made it possible to say, that Man has an inviolable dignity. Where it came from. Why it stood. And what it still means.
We HAVE to turn around and look at it again.
And we must do it without arrogance, and without fear. We must say - Our tradition says something particular about Man. We believe that what it says is True. And we will live in that Truth, and arrange society according to it, and defend it - not as enemies of others, but as people who have come home to where they always belonged.
The other tradition is welcome to stand beside us. But it must stand as what it is.
Not masked as a private religion among others. Not as a variant of the same. As what it is, with the claims it makes and has. So we can look each other in the eyes as what we are, and find a form.
Perhaps we can find one.
Perhaps we cannot.
It will show itself.
What we cannot, as the Western world, is to find a form where we pretend the problem does not exist.
For it does.
And that fiction ends up costing us everything we have been delivered and inherited.
For Man Believes.
And his Belief shapes everything else around him.
And those who believe deepest are those who own the future.
❤️🔥🪽