Last night I sat for almost two and a half hours across from a lovely young Muslim woman, and I have not been able to let go of the conversation since.
She grew up here. She has an education, a husband, two children, a job she is outstandingly good at, and a life that in almost every conceivable way resembles mine. She speaks with a Jutland accent, even though she tried to wrap it up a little and sound like someone from the big city. I mean. Just as silly as the rest of us who have tried that too.
I was fond of her already in the first few minutes, when she opened up her dark eyes - which were full of fire and appetite for life.
I am writing about this because she sees the same thing I see. She just sees it from inside her own faith and culture - while at the same time being from here. She sees a culture that is dissolving itself, where nothing stands firm anymore, and where there are no frames, no order and nothing to lean on. All that is left is a faceless and godless state that administers all of it - and that at the same time does not believe in very much of it. She misses the same thing I do. Something that is true.
Several times during the evening we both had tears in our eyes.
But it was one single sentence in particular that left me speechless. She said quietly, almost in passing, while her voice broke and her whole body sank in on itself, that she could not see a future for her children in this country, with the direction everything is going.
And she is right. With the direction everything is going.
Nor did we disagree about where the direction comes from. The difference between her and me was something else. Apart from our sex, of course. We stand in two different places when it comes to being able to say it out loud.
I can. She cannot.
She cannot, because she is judged the moment she says it, by her own and from inside her own faith. If she expresses what I write below, she is seen as an apostate. Not as someone who loves her faith enough to want to protect it from what is done in its name, but as someone who has left it.
And to get ahead of anyone. She wore a headscarf when she was younger. Not because anyone imposed it on her, just as I often write, but because she, like all of us, wanted to look like "the grown-ups", our older siblings, the ones we look up to, the ones we mirror ourselves in, want to resemble and want to make happy. Towards the end of school, however, she chose herself to take it off again, and that was not a problem either, because her family understood life here and respected that her life was hers. In that connection her mother had a serious conversation with her about it, the way any healthy, sensible and loving mother would, about the essential things in life. Because for her lineage and the heritage she stands in, a headscarf is not just a headscarf. It is belonging, and it is love of God. Not something you just take off and put on as you happen to feel like it. It is not fashion.
I have deep respect for that. All of it. The family, the mother, the conversation, the seriousness, the choice.
And precisely because I want to make sure she can be here as who she is, I have to write what comes next. Once again.
And let me make it extra clear one more time. What comes now is mine - not hers. She has not asked me to write it, and I am not putting it in her mouth.
....
So. Let me repeat quite clearly where I stand, because I am misunderstood from both sides.
My reckoning in these texts is not with the Muslim next to me. I live in the city, and Muslims are part of my everyday life, not a figure in a debate. I train with young Muslim men, many of whom tease me, quite naturally, because they would like to be just as strong and handsome as me 😉 They love to compete and they have quick mouths, and otherwise they are respectful, funny and easy to be around, and they have not forgotten that they are men. I rather like that.
And as soon as they step outside, they are decent. That goes especially for how they are with their family and their community. I see them help each other, even when they do not know each other. They recognise each other. An older woman in a headscarf comes out of the supermarket, about to break her back hauling her groceries, and suddenly there is a young guy standing there asking if he should carry her bags over to the car. I do not see that in many other places in this country. Not like that.
So it is not his prayer, his fasting or his mother's headscarf I have a problem with.
It is Islam as an order, that is, what rises the moment the faith gets power and sharia becomes the law of the state. And the road towards that.
Sharia means "the way". It is the law that Muslims believe God has given through the Quran and the example of Muhammad. Lived privately, it is prayer, fasting and a way of being. But made the law of the state, it governs marriage, dress, speech, belief and punishment, for everyone. Everyone. And because it counts as God's own law, no parliament can ever change it. Saying no to it is no longer politics. It is rebellion against God.
Notice the order in which such an order strikes. Because that is what moves me.
First it hits its own. The woman who takes off her headscarf. The young lad who is gay. The Muslim who doubts, who leaves the faith, or who prays the wrong way. Then the Jews. Then the Christians. Then everyone else.
It sounds like a slogan, but it is not. It is history.
In August 2021, right after Joe Biden's catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban took Kabul. A month later the boys went back to secondary school, and the girls did not. In December 2022 the universities were closed to women as well. Today around 2.4 million Afghan girls are shut out of school after sixth grade, according to UNESCO. The girls are Muslims. So are the men who closed the doors. It was done to them in the name of their own faith.
The young woman cried, understandably, about this yesterday. She has family there.
In February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran, and before a month had passed he ordered the women to cover their hair. Tens of thousands took to the streets in Tehran, and they were told by their own allies on the left that they should wait. They should not have done that. Today the headscarf is law, and in 2022 Mahsa Amini, 22 years old, died in the custody of the morality police. In 2024 Iran executed at least 975 people. Almost all of them Muslims, hanged by a state that calls itself Islamic.
Most Iranians did not take to the streets in 1979 to get compulsory headscarves and hanging judges. They wanted the Shah gone. But once the order had got hold of the state, a no to it meant a no to God, and that is a crime with a punishment. So the many went along. Not because they agreed, but because no one could say no anymore. Without risking paying the highest price.
Salmaan Taseer was governor of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, and he was a Muslim. He defended Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy, and he called the law unjust. In January 2011 his own bodyguard shot him. Lawyers showered the murderer with rose petals, and when he was hanged in 2016, tens of thousands mourned him.
His grave is a holy site today.
The murderer's, that is.
A man who took another Human Being's life because that Human Being had called a law unjust, and who is revered for it, because the law counts as God's.
That is the mechanism. BEFORE the order has power, a Muslim can still say - I do not want sharia for my children. The local community can of course react the way it does here, social control, threats in the inbox and so on. But there is no state to put force and punishment behind it. AFTERWARDS the same sentence is blasphemy or apostasy, and in around ten countries leaving Islam can be punished by death. And from then on no one from inside can stop it. It can ONLY be stopped by those it does not yet have power over.
And ONLY before.
....
Some will say that this is far from here.
It is not.
For two decades the most powerful cleric in Europe's Muslim institutions was the Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He headed the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which was founded in London in 1997 and has since been based in Dublin. The council was meant to tell Europe's Muslims how to live. He was at the same time the Muslim Brotherhood's most influential cleric. In 2013 he said on Egyptian television that Islam would not exist today if the punishment for apostasy had been abolished.
That was Europe's fatwa council.
The Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 to bring society back under sharia, step by step, from the individual to the family, from society to the state.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have designated it a terrorist organisation, and Jordan banned it in 2025. In May 2025 the French government called its network in France a threat to national cohesion. Muslim states ban it.
Most of Europe calls it... civil society.
In 2017 the Muslim lawyer Seyran Ateş opened a mosque in Berlin where men and women pray side by side, and where a woman may lead the prayer. Egypt's official fatwa authority called it "an attack on Islam", and Turkey's religious authority condemned it as well. Today she lives under police protection. In Berlin. Because she practises Islam in a way the order does not allow.
And the order is already at work here, before it has any power. In 2020 the teacher Samuel Paty showed the Muhammad cartoons in a lesson on freedom of expression outside Paris. A parent and an Islamist activist spread his name online, and a week and a half later he was beheaded in the open street. In 2021 a teacher in Batley in England did the same, and he is still living in hiding.
Every single European teacher saw it - and most of them learned the lesson. Understandably. But of course it is the order of the Western world turned upside down.
Then came the word. In 2018 a group of British members of parliament defined the word "Islamophobia" as racism that targets "expressions of Muslimness". It sounds kind, as if you are one of the good ones if you take it on board - but follow it to the end.
If sharia is an expression of Muslimness, and by that definition it is, then criticism of sharia is "racism". And who is silenced first, then?
I will tell you. The Muslim who says no to it from inside. The word does not protect Muslims. It protects the order against them.
And still there are politicians around Europe, here at home too, who cannot get enough of the word and hurl it at anyone who asks questions.
Nor does the order rise alone here. It has helpers, and I will name them. It is the so-called progressive left, walking side by side with Islamists against "Islamophobia". The pro-Palestine mob. It is the Council of Europe, whose 2021 campaign said "freedom is in hijab", the year before Mahsa Amini died for hers. And it is the politicians who let the Islamists speak for "the Muslim community", because they deliver the votes.
Their word for it is 'tolerance'.
But every time a mayor, a minister or a newspaper treats the Islamist as the voice of Muslims, they hand him every single Muslim who disagrees. The girl who wants to take off her headscarf. The young man who wants to leave the faith. The imam who wants a different Islam. And the woman from last night, who cried over her children's future and cannot say why without being judged for it.
The Iranian left made the same deal in 1979, and it was the women who paid first.
The helpers are NEVER the ones who pay.
....
So here is what I am asking.
Stand between the order and the Muslims it wants to press into its frame. Never accept the Islamist as their spokesman. Protect the one who doubts, the one who leaves the faith, and the one who takes off her headscarf. Do it loudly. And ban the Muslim Brotherhood, as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Jordan have already done.
Say the word sharia. And say no to it.
And if you are a Muslim and do not want sharia for your children, then this is for you too. I know it already costs something to say it. For some it is a cold look in the mosque, an angry uncle or a lost friend. For the woman from yesterday it is bigger than that. She would be seen as an apostate by her own.
That is exactly why the rest of us must not be silent. Not to speak in her place, but to stand there, so that the day she says it, she does not stand alone. Then we stand in between. Hard. And without a single compromise. If the order wins, the same words will cost her everything. And silence is always counted as consent.
There is only one point in time when an order like this can be stopped, and that is before it has power. In Tehran that moment passed in 1979, and in Kabul in 2021.
In the West it is now.
If her children are to grow up here with room to believe, to doubt and to choose, the way she herself was allowed to, then it takes ALL OF US. Muslims among us TOO.
The young woman should not have to be brave to be able to be here.
That is our task. The men in particular. Even though I know full well that some of you are trying to dissolve reality so that there are neither men nor women. But there are. Incidentally, one more thing my Muslim friends are in no doubt about. Because in their world - even though they do not want Sharia - there are things that stand firm in reality and are not up for negotiation.
So.
Stand in between.
Now, while no one has to die for saying no.
Because that is what is on its way - if you crawl after Løkke and his friends' half-crazy ideas.
❤️🔥🪽
Good evening, friends
