ISLAM IS NOT A DIAGNOSIS
I want to show you another pattern. One of those that lies so close to the eye you can't see it. One that has lain before us for nearly thirty years.
It is mostly about ourselves and the distortions we live inside.
Try to notice the words, next time integration is up for debate.
Dialogue coffee.
Mentor programmes.
Neighbourhood mothers.
Bridge-builders.
Safety walks.
Role model corps.
Resource persons.
Comprehensive plans.
Conversation courses.
Exit programmes.
Hand-held intervention.
Und so weitere…
Do read them once more.
And then follow along.
That is not the language of policy, and it is not the language of law. It is the therapist's. That is how one speaks in a waiting room. In Denmark.
And it is not even a metaphor.
The state's own action plans against radicalisation are built over the healthcare system's prevention model - "the prevention triangle", with "capacity-building, preventive and intervention measures", with "risk behaviour" and "levels of concern" and "early detection".
Words one uses about diseases.
It stands in black and white in the plans themselves.
And it is not accidental.
It is the deepest assumption in thirty years of Western approach to Islam, so deep that it is never stated, because it lies beneath all the others - that what we are facing is a condition that can be treated.
That it is about something rooted in marginalisation, in trauma, in social inheritance, in lack of recognition, in being on the outside. Something that would dissolve itself, if only we listened long enough, understood deeply enough, met people rightly enough. And taught them to do, and be, like us.
Radicalisation became a symptom. The mosques' messages became expressions of powerlessness. The parallel societies became a reaction to us. The entire civilisational encounter between two, in some axes opposing worlds, was rewritten into a patient record, where the West sat in the therapist's chair and Islam lay on the couch.
But - and it is important to get hold of this properly - therapy rests on a precondition that no one checked -
That the client himself wants the change. That behind the behaviour sits a person who deep down wants the same thing as the therapist and just lacks the tools.
It is a beautiful assumption between two people in a consultation room. But transferred onto a fourteen-hundred-year-old civilisational order based on a complete cosmological worldview, it is not beautiful.
It is blind.
STONE BLIND.
For Islam does not lie on the couch wanting to become like us. Islam is not a condition that has gone wrong from the start. Islam is not a personality disorder or something that needs to be assessed and treated.
Islam is a complete order - in its own understanding a perfect order revealed for the last time by God for submission and observance - with law, theology, self-understanding and direction, carried by people who believe in it, and who have not asked for treatment, because they are not suffering from anything.
They mean something.
For they believe in something.
The real explanation for why it is so hard for us to see and understand probably rests on our own loss. For one only recognises faith if one knows oneself what it is to believe.
The West once had its own answer to the greatest questions, a frame so large that everything else could find its place within it, and when we laid it aside, the need to understand did not disappear, only the capacity to understand at that scale. So we began to explain the large with the small.
People who believe in a fourteen-hundred-year-old order became people with upbringing conditions. Conviction became background. Will became vulnerability. And so on. Not because it was true, but because those were the frames we had left, when the great one was gone.
The one who no longer believes in anything himself cannot imagine that others do so in earnest. Really. In earnest.
But they do.
But then notice what the therapist's gaze actually does - for it is sold as respect by the Man in the Television and his many Experts and it is the opposite.
When one explains a Muslim's conviction with trauma and social inheritance, one is saying that his faith is not genuine, only a symptom of something else. One makes him a patient instead of meeting him as an adult. The one who takes Islam seriously as will shows more respect than the one who explains it away as suffering.
It is the therapist who talks down.
And it has been all along.
NONE OF YOU would accept being spoken to that way and met like that. Most of you DESPISE SystemDenmark when it comes presumptuously with its suffocating false empathy and "we mean well for you, you just need to fall in line".
Thirty years. Three decades of action plans and interventions and dialogue, and in the same period the parallel societies grew, the mosques' influence grew, the neighbourhoods grew where Denmark's order has stepped back.
It does not happen because the treatment was underfunded. But because the diagnosis was wrong.
And yes, there were tightenings along the way, but notice what they were called. Once again. The ghetto package came with comprehensive plans and social housing initiatives tucked under its arm. Even the hand that gripped more firmly spoke as if in the waiting room.
One cannot treat anyone for meaning something. One can only decide whether what they mean should have power in one's own house.
The therapist asks - how are you?
Civilisation asks - what do you want!?
We stopped asking the second question - at least - thirty years ago.
It is time we asked it again.
This time at adult height.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Wednesday, friends ☀️
