I promised to continue where yesterday's post left off - the one about the therapist's language, the waiting room and the diagnosis of Islam that was wrong.
So let us begin with a quiet question that sounds innocent, but is not. Every therapist, psychologist and psychiatrist has asked themselves this question several times through their career.
What does a therapist do when the treatment does not work?
Not for a year. Not for five. But for thirty.
He has two options.
He can admit that the diagnosis was wrong - but then his entire role falls, his method, his self-understanding, everything that made him the one sitting in the chair and not on the bench. Or he can find the error that explains "why it did not work" somewhere else.
Try to notice what actually happened during this period. Especially those of you who are old enough to have lived through it. Every time integration failed, every time a parallel society grew, every time reality did not obey as we were told it would by the Man on Television and his many Experts - what did the debate then come to be about?
Not about Islam.
Or maybe the first few minutes.
After that.
About us.
The explanations were presented not just in Denmark, but to all the local populations in Europe, in terms such as - Structural discrimination. Islamophobia. Unconscious prejudice. Fear of contact. Lack of inclusivity. If not outright racism.
The West rose from the therapist's chair, voluntarily lay down on the bench and began - when it all would not obey as one had said it would - to examine itself instead.
It is no longer the Muslim who is the patient. It is Denmark. It is you. Your upbringing must be inspected, your language must be cleansed, your reactions must be scrutinised for what you do not yourself know you are failing at.
And then see how ingeniously that system is put together, if you are 'the therapist'. Because the framework cannot lose.
If the treatment works, the diagnosis was right. If it does not work, it is proof that we have not treated ourselves thoroughly enough. The journal is closed around itself. And there exists no outcome in reality - no statistics, no neighbourhood, no development - that can make the system say - "we were wrong about what we were facing."
That is the first step in the delusion we have lived through. There are two more. And they lie beneath the first like layers in an excavation.
Because why did the self-diagnosis feel right? Why was it so easy to believe that the error must be our own?
Because the entire building in Denmark rests on one assumption that no one has ever defended aloud, because it has never been stated aloud - that all people deep down want the same thing.
Freedom, as we understand freedom. Secularism, as we understand secularism. The individual before the collective, conscience before law, doubt before submission. That Muslims are therefore really just us - just delayed. There is just "Us, waiting to be unpacked."
Try going to Saudi Arabia and selling them that idea. Or Iran. Or Afghanistan. The laughter will not cease before the 22nd century. I guarantee it. And partly with good reason.
It is sold as humanism. And humanism as the most beautiful thing we have. But humanism is not the most beautiful thing we have. It is a jewel, cut by something far deeper - a shine borrowed from the diamond we put down and imagined that no one would miss.
But listen now to what it actually says. Islam has for fourteen hundred years formulated what it is and what it wants. It says it in its texts. It says it in its sermons. It says it in its law, its order, its way of arranging society, everywhere it has been able to arrange them. It speaks clearly, repeatedly, without circumlocution in all axes of its architecture.
And the West answers, every time, with a patient smile: - "ahhh... you do not really mean that. You are like us inside..."
It is not respect. It is the deepest form of not listening that exists. We have made deafn... I mean deafness into a virtue and called it openness.
The one who takes another Person's words seriously, even when the words are uncomfortable, listens. The one who translates everything the other says into something he likes better - speaks only with himself.
We have spoken with ourselves for thirty years. In a room we thought had two in it.
And then the third layer, the lowest, the one that is the most uncomfortable to touch.
The two parties in this meeting are not alike. Not because one is strong and the other weak - that is not where the difference lies.
The difference is seriousness.
One party knows what it believes. It has known it for a long time, it teaches it on to its children, and it acts on it across generations. It thinks in centuries, because it has an answer that reaches further than a life. It has time. Patience is not its weakness. Patience is its strategy.
The other party - that is us - has forgotten what it believed. It thinks in election periods and budget years, it changes course when the polls change, and it can no longer say what it will preserve, because it has forgotten why it was worth preserving. It is busy, precisely because none of what it does reaches further than the next agreement. Which never really becomes anything anyway.
It is not a battle between evil and good. It is hardly even a battle. It is a meeting between one who knows what he wants - and one who has forgotten the question.
And now you can see how the three layers hang together, and why I call it a delusion and not an error.
An error can be corrected with information. A delusion defends itself against information. We diagnosed ourselves, because we could not contain that the other meant it. We could not contain that the other meant it, because we have forgotten what it means to mean something with one's whole life. And we have forgotten it, because we put our own great framework down and imagined that no one would miss it.
Islam is not the accused of the text. Islam is consistent - it is what it says it is, and it has never hidden that. The confused party in this meeting is not the one who prays five times a day. It is the one who has forgotten and lost the ability to understand why church bells ring.
I do not write this to make anyone angry. There is plenty of anger, and it pushes from both fronts, and we have seen that end of history before in Europe, and no one who has read a history book to the end wants that.
And my accusation is not directed at people. It is directed at an order - and at our own blindness to it. Muslims know perfectly well that Islam means it seriously. They are the first to know it. It is only us who insist that they do not.
I write this because there is still another way, and it does not begin with harder words or harder hands. It begins with us seeing clearly. That we stop treating and begin listening - to what Islam actually says about itself. And that we this time believe it.
That we rediscover our own answer to the great questions, because only the one who himself stands on something can stand firm when another pushes.
Because that is what awakening is. Not anger. Not fear. Just this one thing - to take the other at their word - and then decide what shall have power in one's own house.
And it is Ours. The Western World's House we live in. We cannot defend that house if we insist on forgetting why we built it.
But one can remember it.
And the one who remembers can decide.
Shall we?
❤️🔥🪽
...
"And what does this last part mean then? Will you send us all back to the church benches with folded hands over the quilts and return to a time we left a hundred years ago, Thomas - what is this?"
Look at me. Look at my life. Look at what goes on here on the page.
The answer is obviously no.
Or rather - if one wants to, then one should of course do it - I do not stand in the way of anyone. It is your faith. The church benches are still there, and they are open to anyone who wants them. And it is a good place to start.
But it is not the church I am pointing to.
I am pointing to Him.
Christianity belongs to no institution.
It is something else. Deeper.
I would like to write more about that over the weekend and in the coming time. But I likely will not reach it tomorrow, as I have promised Krisztina a final Friday party, before we conclude the summer holiday in Vendsyssel and return to Frederiksberg.
I have only my Word.
And I try to take it seriously.
So all are warned.
