Several comments in the comment thread after yesterday's post about Hizb ut-Tahrir on Deadline, deserve their own post.
Some of the sharpest responses did not come from outraged Danes. They came from Muslims. And it does not seem as though they were angry about what I wrote. Which was not the intention either. They were calm. Friendly. But the complaint ran, in different versions, something along these lines -
"You describe our, Islam's, architecture. Fine. But look at your own. Your liberalism cannot explain anything at all. It does not know what a Human Being is. It does not know what it is here for. It cannot even justify its own rules. You have freedom for everything and reason for nothing. That is why you look so weak."
Perhaps what I write next will surprise you, but -
They are right.
Not in the conclusion - we will return to that - but in the diagnosis. It is precise. It is actually more precise than most of what our own commentators have produced in thirty years. Most of what has led us directly into the insurmountable problems we face these years. And precisely for that reason we must not wave it away.
We must take it in and look at it properly, because it points to the hole in the West that EVERYTHING else is seeping out of.
So let us look at it. Calmly. From the inside.
Liberalism has never been an answer to the great questions. It cannot be. Because that was not what it was built for.
It arose in the ashes after the wars of religion as a set of game rules for how people who profoundly disagree about the truth can live together without killing each other. Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, separation of powers, the right to be wrong. It is a peace treaty. And one of the cleverest ever concluded.
But a peace treaty is not a foundation.
Try asking liberalism what a human being is. It answers - an individual with rights. Ask what it should do with its life. It answers - that is up to it. Ask what is worth living for, what one says to one's son about death, why one should be faithful to one's wife when no one discovers the opposite. It does not answer. It CANNOT answer. Not because it is stupid, but because the questions lie outside its jurisdiction.
It is designed to keep the space open - not to fill it.
It is the Fence around a Garden.
And the fence is good. The fence is precious. But for three or four generations we have committed an error that many are only now seeing the outline of - we tore up the garden and kept painting the fence. We took the foundation that the liberties grew out of - the notion of a Human Being carried by an Image, a Truth above power, a Conscience that is someone's voice and not just a rustling in the nervous system - and set it aside as something we had outgrown.
And then we were left with the rules. Only the rules.
Freedom for what? More freedom. Choice for what? More choices. Tolerance as the highest and by now only virtue - and tolerance cannot be loved, one cannot sing about it, no young man has ever risen for a procedural rule.
That is what they see, the Muslims, when they look at us. Not a strong house with open doors. An open house, where all doors have been pulled, and the living room stands EMPTY.
And now to what is actually at stake - because a void like the one we have created is not a stable condition.
It is an invitation.
Look at our own young people. A boy who asks what he should do with his life and is told he must figure that out himself does not stop asking. He goes where someone answers. Some go to the complete architecture that was on Deadline yesterday - Islam - the conversions in Europe's cities are not a mystery, they are a receipt from our own young people, for the void we have left them in.
Others go to replacement religions on the domestic market - the merciless ideologies that hobble along on crutches - communism, fascism and now most recently intersectionality - that offer them everything faith had - sin, guilt, confession, enemy and salvation. Just without grace.
And the rest numb themselves with nihilism and hedonism through the screen. Porn, AI girlfriends, doomscrolling's dopamine addiction. The void did not disappear when we emptied it. It just became vacant.
Now look at our institutions. A journalist and a national politician cannot defend something they cannot justify. That was what we saw in the studio. They have all the rules lined up but no firm ground under them - and therefore they did everything right, and none of it worked.
Because one cannot stand firm on an open door.
And look finally at how it is read from outside.
A complete Order does not read our emptiness as peacefulness. It reads it as vacant terrain. It does not do so because it is evil, but because that is what emptiness IS in any civilisational grammar - space. Weakness invites, it always has, and it invites most strongly where it calls itself openness.
And for precisely this Order the invitation is not a temptation it must first talk itself into. It is the very movement it is built of. The expansion is not a misuse of the architecture - it IS the architecture: the world divided into the house that is already subject to the Order, and the house that is not yet, and between them one direction, forward - country by country, quarter by quarter - until all humanity stands gathered in one Ummah under one law.
It is not a world religion in the sense of a faith that exists across the entire world. It is a faith whose stated aim is that the entire world exists under it.
Read that, if you did not catch it - because there is a TREMENDOUS difference between these two things, which it is absolutely necessary to understand.
This far our Muslim critics are right, and one owes it to say that aloud. For our own sake.
But then there is the conclusion. And here they are wrong - not in the logic, but in the premise.
Because they have been led to believe that the void IS the West. That liberalism is all we have. That the house has always been empty, and that their full building therefore stands above our empty one.
But liberalism is not the West. It is the West's fence. The garden it stood around still exists - the Story about the Human Being with the Image in it, about the Truth above every throne, about a Freedom that is not an empty space but a RESPONSIBILITY, given by something higher than the State and deeper than Desire. The answer that was in the garden built the cathedrals and the hospitals and science and finally freedom itself - and it has not perished. It has just been laid aside by us, because we were told it had no value. It is beginning to dawn on many that perhaps it did after all. Fortunately it still lies where we left it.
And that is the difference between our situation and their diagnosis.
He who has lost his foundation is weak.
He who has FORGOTTEN it is only sleeping.
We are sleeping.
Many are waking up.
The man from Hizb ut-Tahrir in the studio has an answer, and we have seen what it does to conversation, to woman, to freedom, to the Human Being. Very few here wish to live under his answer and his Law.
Therefore the task is not to disprove his answer. Because it cannot be disproven, only rejected.
The task is to be able to do something no debate can do for us -
To remember our own answer.
Because emptiness loses to completeness. Every time. But completeness has never won over a Human Being who knows what it stands on.
And we stand on much, much more than we have been allowed to know - and someone has told you for a very, very long time.
❤️🔥🪽
And then an afterthought, for those who read all the way down here. Because all the above may sound like spirit and abstraction - but the hole in the foundation also stands in a completely concrete place. A hole that is being exploited these years.
It stands in the constitution.
The constitution is - like the American constitution - written under an assumption no one then needed to say aloud - that the greatest religious variation in the population would be degrees of Christianity. Grundtvigians against mission people, high church against low church, believers against doubters.
Religious freedom - which we rightly pride ourselves on - from 1849 was a freedom to vary WITHIN a common elevation of the Human Being - a human being with conscience, personal relationship with God and a law that stood under the state, NOT above it. That was the variation the paragraphs were meant to contain. No more.
Therefore there are no defences written into it against a faith that is not a faith in that sense, but a complete, God-given social order with its own law, its own judgement and its own aim for the state itself. That nothing is written against this scenario was not an oversight. It is not written because it was unthinkable - like writing fire regulations for the sea.
That is what both the constitution and the American constitution are struggling with these years. They were built as houses where all residents agreed on the foundation and only quarrelled about the furnishings.
Now a different building plan has moved in - and the paragraphs that were meant to protect variation now protect that which will abolish them.
Europe has seen the movement before. The Weimar Republic was not toppled from outside - it was applied for from inside, through its own paragraphs, by men who said openly that they would use democracy to abolish it. Germany learned the lesson and wrote it into its post-war constitution. We never learned it, because with us the threat came from outside then, in uniform, and was possible to spot.
This one comes from inside, through the liberties themselves - and that is why it is harder.
The constitution can defend itself against its enemies. It has just never learned to recognise one that applies through its own paragraphs.
That is a hole that must be closed - and closed quickly - so we have a bulwark against the building that is currently standing in the application queue. And we do not need to invent anything. Germany closed it after the war with one simple sentence in its constitution -
Freedom does not apply to those who use it to abolish it.
That is called a democracy that can defend itself, and it is not a break with the spirit of the constitution - it IS its spirit, finally written down. Religious freedom in 1849 was meant as freedom for faith. It was never meant as building permission for a competing state order.
The distinction is not new. It is the oldest we have - what is Caesar's, and what is God's. We just need to write it in, where it is missing.
Before someone else writes theirs.
Do you know someone who can take that task on their shoulders?
