ISLAM'S STRUCTURAL IMMUTABILITY
- and the limits of Western civilisation
There exists a particular form of naivety that springs not from ill will, but from a lack of understanding of what one is actually facing.
It shows itself when Western politicians - now in their fourth decade - imagine they can talk a 1,400-year-old religion into compliance. As though the problem were a question of tone. Or as though it were merely about finding the right phrasing.
If only one says it clearly enough.
If only one says it kindly enough.
If only one says it rationally enough.
Then the religion will surely adapt.
But that thought rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion and faith actually are.
To speak of negotiating with a religion is like believing one can negotiate with a mountain - and expect it to move.
Religions are not opinions people thought up one afternoon and can therefore set aside again. They are not positions one adjusts when the wind shifts. And they are not proposals for conversation.
They are foundational narratives.
Maps of reality.
Answers given before the question is even asked.
They tell man who he is before he gets to ask. Explain what truth is before doubt arises, and who holds authority before disagreement even becomes possible.
To enter dialogue with the expectation of change is like walking into an ancient myth and suggesting the hero skip the trials because times have changed. Like asking a river to flow uphill because it would be more reasonable. Or like proposing that the sun rise in the west a few days a week - to equalise the inequality between the corners of the earth and improve the Gini coefficient.
But myths do not listen.
They shape.
One can walk within them.
One can submit to them.
One can stand outside and see them for what they are.
But one cannot discuss them into becoming something else.
This is not harshness.
It is the architecture of reality.
And this is where the misunderstanding arises.
When modern politicians speak as though they stand in a negotiating situation, while they actually stand before an order.
The great religions are civilisational wholes. Coherent worldviews where faith, law, morality, authority, family, gender and power are woven together across centuries. Crystallised, tested, time-proven ideas - where one cannot pull at a single thread without the entire fabric shifting.
Therefore it is absurd to imagine that one can politically edit them.
Particularly in Islam.
For here the revelation is understood not as historical, interpreted or gradually unfolded, but as final, perfect and immutable. Not as man's search for God - but as God's definitive word to man.
Precisely therefore there is no mandate for revision.
No room for rewriting.
No authority that can place itself above the revealed.
And those who have tried have not lost arguments.
They have lost limbs, lives - and entire societies.
To change it would not be reform.
It would be to abolish the religion's own foundation.
And one naturally cannot do that.
For consider this -
No one in the Western world would suggest that Christianity should trim the Ten Commandments down to seven to fit better into the present day. No one would seriously believe that Catholicism should let certain passages in the New Testament fade into the background because they collide with modern sensibility.
And if anyone did... imagine the reaction in Italy.
In Poland.
In South America.
We know intuitively that religion does not work that way.
Yet we imagine it should work that way with Islam.
This is not merely naïve.
It is a cataclysmic category error in thinking.
Once one understands this, another illusion falls away - that the political task consists in changing the religion. Talking it into line. Getting believers to abandon parts of it.
It does not.
For one cannot.
The actual task is far more sober.
And precisely therefore far more serious.
The only real question is not whether we can make Islam resemble the Western world more. But whether its structure is at all compatible with ours.
For the problem arises when one mixes two fundamentally different ways of understanding law and authority - and asks them to live and exist right on top of each other.
This is not a question of sympathy.
Not about intentions.
Not about good people.
It is a question of structure. And the recognition that structures can be incompatible, even when people desire peace.
Two civilisational ordering systems that build on different fundamental assumptions about law, truth and authority cannot exist on top of one another without constant tension. Without states of exception. And without conflicts that must constantly be administered, explained away or dampened.
To point this out is not hatred.
It is recognition.
And it is necessary.
When the illusion of negotiation falls away, we are therefore left with the only question that makes sense:
Not - "How do we change a religion?"
But - "What do we do when it is not compatible with our own civilisational order?"
That question cannot be postponed indefinitely.
And it cannot be answered with morality alone.
It is a political question.
And a civilisational responsibility.
To protect the order on which freedom, rule of law and human dignity rest.
Not in anger.
Not in hatred.
But in clarity.
For without clear boundaries, no civilisation can endure.
❤️🔥🪽
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One can naturally also choose another path - one where we leave behind Christianity, Roman law and Greek philosophy - which are the foundational pillars of the Western world - forever and abandon them.
One can decide that Europe should be Islamic.
That is in itself a legitimate political position to hold.
And a legitimate outcome to desire.
But then one also owes the population honesty.
For if that is the path one wishes to take, Europeans should be given a clear and unambiguous picture of what consequences it has for law, freedom, rights and the structure of society.
So people can orient themselves.
So families can make choices.
So citizens - precisely as those who have arrived have done over the last fifty years - can take their precautions.
Even if that entails leaving what was once their home.
What one cannot permit oneself is to act as though nothing fundamental is changing. To present a civilisational shift as an administrative adjustment. Or to call it coexistence when it is in reality the replacement of order.
Honesty is the least a society owes its own.
And clarity is a prerequisite for any real freedom.
