The last three days I have written about People, about Faith and about Civilisation.
About how a people is not an administrative construction - but a living organism with memory, inheritance and story.
About how all humans believe in something - and that the void after God does not remain empty.
About the three streams that wove together and built something - the Western civilisational model - which has never arisen elsewhere in the same way.
Today is Good Friday.
And Good Friday is the day when one sits with what is difficult. Without jumping to the solution. Without looking away.
So let us do that today.
...
There is something in the air in Europe today.
Most sense it. Fewer can put words to it. And even fewer, even among those who can, dare say it aloud.
It is an unease. A sense that something is about to tip. That the rules of the game are slowly changing - imperceptibly, but consistently in one direction. That what once was self-evident no longer is. That in certain contexts one holds back. Weighs one's words. Looks over one's shoulder.
If you are the one experiencing this, then let me reassure you and say - you are not suffering from paranoia.
It is healthy pattern recognition.
Yesterday I described the three streams the Western civilisation is built upon. Today we look at what happens when another and differently structured civilisational stream meets this foundation. Without resorting to generalisations about people. But with open eyes.
Let us start with the most fundamental - and perhaps the least understood.
Islam is not just a religion in the Western sense. It is not a private faith one carries to church on Sunday and sets aside again on the way out.
Islam is a complete civilisational order.
Read that sentence again.
A complete civilisational order means - a unified understanding of humanity, law, the state, family, the sexes and the relationship between God and the world. Din and dawla. Faith and state. In one. Inseparable.
And central to this order lies the concept of umma - the global Muslim community. A loyalty that by nature is supranational. That cuts across borders, flags and citizenships.
An architectural construction in the faith that makes it a worldview.
There is as such nothing wrong with that - we know it from many contexts. Doors open across societies, for people who share everything from worldview to interests.
But when this loyalty is pressed against loyalty to the people one lives among - in a conflict, in a courtroom, in a neighbourhood, in a school - there is for many (quite naturally) no doubt which weighs heavier.
Not because they are traitors. But because they are consistent in their faith. For them something is more important than other things. And nothing is more important than Allah and his law.
Some in this country call it extremism. But it is not. It is orthodoxy.
In classical Islamic theology this bears a name - al-wala wal-bara. Loyalty towards fellow believers. Distancing from non-believers. It is not a peripheral or radical teaching. It is found in the Quran, in hadith and in classical Islamic jurisprudence.
It is an obligation that by definition supersedes all other loyalties. Including loyalty to the people and the country one lives among.
This is where the first and deepest incompatibility lies with the Western civilisational order. Not in outward behaviour. But in whom one ultimately belongs to.
If one is an observant Muslim, then this naturally is not even a question. Completely understandable.
For in classical Islamic theology the world is divided in two.
Dar al-islam - "the house of peace". The lands and peoples that live under God's law. And dar al-harb - "the house of war". The rest of the world. That which is not yet subject to Allah and his law.
It is not a metaphor. It is a juridical and theological category that has shaped Islamic foreign thinking for over a thousand years.
The ultimate goal is not coexistence. It is that the house of peace with time comes to encompass everything. That dar al-harb ceases to exist. Not necessarily through the sword - but through dawah, through demographic growth, through political influence and through patience.
For they have time. They think in generations.
And here is the decisive difference to the Western model.
Jesus said explicitly to Pilate - "my kingdom is not of this world". It is not a pious sentence. It is a civilisational declaration. A rejection that truth shall be realised through earthly dominance, political power or military conquest.
The Western civilisation has grown forth from this declaration. Not always consistently. Not without setbacks and abuse. But the direction is unambiguous - no earthly totalitarian power can lay claim to the absolute.
It is the opposite of dar al-islam.
But let us become even more concrete, where the two civilisational models collide.
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FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE SACRED
The Western model rests on a premise so fundamental we hardly think about it - no idea is protected from criticism. Not political ideologies. Not scientific theories. Not religions. Not even Frederiksen and Løkke even though they squirm.
It is not so on the basis of disrespect. We have arranged ourselves thus because it is the very mechanism behind truth-seeking. It is what made science possible. What made the rule of law possible. What made the free press possible.
Islam has a different fundamental premise - the sacred cannot be violated without consequence.
The Muhammad cartoons. Charlie Hebdo. Salman Rushdie. Theo van Gogh. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. These are not isolated incidents committed by individuals. It is the same pattern repeating itself. Every time. Everywhere.
These are two fundamentally opposing premises, which cannot both be right at the same time, in the same place. A tension that in Denmark has been attempted solved with what became known as the Quran law - and thereby takes a step away from our own Western freedom-oriented and rights-based model. And which therefore - instead of solving the problem - made it even more tension-filled.
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WOMEN AND FREEDOM
The Western model says - a Human is a Human regardless of sex. Freedom is not conditional on who one is born as.
It is not just an opinion. It is a consequence of Imago Dei - of the fact that each human bears a divine image that cannot be reduced to a function or a role.
In the Islamic model men and women are not equal in juridical and social terms. It is not a peripheral detail. It is deeply theologically anchored. It is seen in concrete neighbourhoods, concrete families, concrete schools - where girls are kept home, where marriages are arranged, where a woman's testimony weighs half as much as a man's. With their own meaningful causal explanations one believes deeply in.
It is not a small cultural variation.
It is a different understanding of what a human is.
Not what it does. Not what it chooses. But what it fundamentally is - and what place it therefore has in the divine order.
That is what anthropology means. The doctrine of Humanity. And when two civilisations have fundamentally different answers to what a Human is - then it has fundamentally different consequences for how they arrange EVERYTHING else.
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HOMOSEXUALITY AND FAMILY VIEW
In the Western model love between two humans is love. It has taken us centuries to reach there. It rests on the same basic assertion - that human dignity is not conditional on whom one loves.
In many Islamic interpretations homosexuality is not just forbidden. It is in a number of Muslim countries punishable by death. Not as historical remnant. But as current law - today!
It is not a nuance that can be negotiated away.
It is a real abyss.
And it is an abyss many Western people have not yet faced - because the "tolerance" and "inclusivity" that is one of the Western model's greatest achievements has made us blind to the fact that not everyone shares the premise that love between two humans is love.
There are people - not few, and not peripheral - who will lay down their lives to ensure that this Western understanding never gains the slightest form of foothold. Not as a threat - but anchored as conviction.
That is also part of what we do not say aloud.
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PARALLEL SOCIETIES AND PARALLEL JUSTICE
Most know it. Fewer say it.
There are neighbourhoods in Danish, Scandinavian and European cities where Danish police do not come. Not because they may not. But because they have learned it does not help. Where conflicts are resolved according to other rules. Where the imam weighs heavier than the judge. Where the one who reports something to authorities is the traitor - instead of the one who committed the act.
One might think it was because integration has failed. But it is not.
It is a parallel order that is establishing itself. Quietly. Patiently. Over time.
A different way than the legal society and the rule of law that resolves conflicts, disputes and settlements. A conscious and desired mechanism.
A different civilisational model and order.
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DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT
This is what no one will say aloud.
But numbers are numbers. And people who think civilisationally and intergenerationally - as we yesterday established that strong civilisations ALWAYS do - know what demographic shift means over two to three generations.
For who lives where. For what is normal in a neighbourhood, normal in a city, normal in a country. For who votes. For what is taught. For what may be said and not said. For what the country ultimately looks like.
For several decades huddled - but I assume - well-meaning politician types have tried to dismiss this as some kind of conspiracy. We must assume they did not have access to the best mathematics teacher when they were in school.
For it is solely a question of mathematics and time.
Demography is destiny.
And it is shifting.
Rapidly.
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ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM
The oldest hatred in the world today grows fastest in Europe.
Read that sentence again too.
It does not happen primarily from the old stupid low-frequency right wing. But from mosques. From schools. From streets in cities we thought we knew. From generation to generation transmitted as a natural part of worldview.
And it is not accidental. It is theologically anchored in a way of reading the world where the Jew is the eternal enemy of Islam and God.
October 7, 2023 showed us what that means in practice - not just in Gaza, but in the streets of Paris, London, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Where people celebrated the massacre. Not in hiding. But openly. And have since held an endless weekend mass of demonstrations that inflame a hatred that does not belong in - or is shared by - Western civilisation.
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We could spend several hours listing more examples of these opposing orientations in the two models. But let us stop here for now.
Let me instead conclude by stating -
NONE of this expresses that Muslims are evil or bad people. Not an expression of lesser value or less right to believe in what makes most sense to them. In my eyes they are humans created in God's Image. Regardless of whether they recognise that idea or not.
Let me say that again.
Nothing of what I write is about what or who is best - or who is right.
It is about pointing to differences that - if we let them remain unconscious - lead to conflict.
It is about how a civilisational worldview - when it is strong, coherent, demographically growing and deeply convinced of its own Truth - like Islam - does NOT adapt to its surroundings.
IT SHAPES THEM.
It has always been so. It is not Islam that is different from other strong civilisations in history.
It is us who have forgotten how civilisations work. What they do when they meet weakness. And what weakness invites.
We invited.
We held the door open.
We called it 'strength'.
It was not.
It was forgetting.
And that recognition is seeping in across Europe.
Good Friday is the day when nothing is solved.
Where what was true and good and worth dying for - is slain. Laid in the grave. Sealed with a stone.
And where no one yet knows what comes.
Europe finds itself on a Good Friday. Even in relation to our allies. Because we lost the historical memory and understanding of our civilisation - and therefore the orientation.
We can sense it. We actually know it - many of us. But we do not yet know if we will rise. If we will find our way back to what carries. If we will take on our inheritance again - with responsibility and love - or if we will remain lying in the hope that someone else will fix it.
So let me be the bearer of bad news.
No one else is coming to fix it.
There is only us.
But Good Friday is not the ending. The disciples did not know that that evening a couple thousand years ago, when they sat in the darkness and thought it was over.
From where we sit, we know what came.
So seize Faith. Hope. And Love.
Tomorrow I write about what is required of us - as humans, as a people, as a civilisation - if we want to find our way back to what carries.
Good Friday, friends.
❤️🔥🪽
