THE ASHURA PROCESSION
I had not intended to write about it. Not because there is anything to evade, but because what happened yesterday afternoon is for me as predictable as rain falling downward. It follows from the way Islam is structured, and from the way Europe is structured, and when two orders are screwed together like those two, what happens is precisely what one can work out in advance.
There was therefore for me nothing to point to that was not already open to anyone.
But since yesterday one angry text has followed the other - anger at Islam, anger at Muslims - each more childish than the last - and that is what made me write about it after all.
For the procession was theirs. It was their faith, and it is their right, under both Danish and European law. I care for that right, and I do not surrender it to be shouted blindly down without acknowledging what one risks thereby. I can - and all of you should be able to - acknowledge a person's need to believe, deeply and wholly, while at the same time seeing clearly the order that faith erects. For the two things do not exclude each other. They carry each other.
So I have decided I would rather cut my own position clean than let anger draw the full picture.
For it does not cover where I stand or what I see.
The procession in Copenhagen was the Ashura procession where several thousand this year in black mourning garments made their way from Dronning Louises Bro down Nørrebrogade toward the Imam Ali Mosque. It marks the memory of Husayn, the Prophet's (that is Muhammad's) grandson, killed at Karbala more than 1,300 years ago. It is one of Shia Islam's deepest days of mourning. One that has been upheld and carried forward for more than a thousand years, generation after generation, and which is therefore not something that just subsides or slides away for the one who believes. It is not a mood that comes and goes. It is a foundation stone, and it lies where it lies. And it does not go away.
What I want to say, however, is not about the grief. It is about what we see when we see it.
I do not comment on it because there is nothing surprising in it. Islam wills what it wills. It will spread, it will dominate, it will subjugate, and it has willed that openly for 1,400 years. It is not hidden, and it is not an accusation I lay over it. It is its own declared intention regarding Man and Society and the world. It does PRECISELY what anyone with two grams of sense would expect. Nothing is concealed.
The decisive thing is not that Islam wants something.
The decisive thing is what that will is written into. For Islam is not a force of nature. But it is shaped according to patterns that mimic one. Its order is not conceived as a draft to be tested and corrected over time, but as a revelation, fixed once, made complete beforehand.
The law is not adopted, it is given, and what is given by God, man cannot vote on. The text is not a conversation that continues, it is the LAST ETERNAL word.
It is an architecture built to last eternally and not to be altered, and that is where its strength and its force lie. And it is precisely that which, right up to now, seems to have been incomprehensible to the naive European politician.
For a will one can negotiate with can be softened. A will locked inside a form constructed never to revise itself cannot. And that is how Islam acquires a natural force's relentlessness without being one, and it is deliberately it has been put together that way.
It is a construction - as one who loves words and language - I have genuine respect for, but which I simultaneously believe is fundamentally wrong, and which in any case cannot be reconciled with the way the West understands the world, man and freedom.
Therefore the question is never whether Islam adapts itself. The answer to whether it does has been given us through the last 1,400 years. And the answer to that does not shift because we are compliant, considerate, drink coffee, negotiate and make room. Yielding does not alter an Order built not to be alterable.
And this is where parts of Europe's so-called "leaders" still live in an imagination. The imagination that Islam is something other than what it is. That we can talk with it, soften it, turn it into our little sweet reformed Islam-Light that plays by the rules the RUC-types have written for all the rest of us.
But an order created to be eternal does not wish to become another, and it does not hide that. It divides the world into what is already subjugated, and what is not yet. It is written. It has never been secret. And it will never be different.
And there is a pattern here that everyone can now see, even those who long denied it. For decades we were told from the political side that numbers meant nothing, that figures were a distraction, that the only thing that counted was the individual. That those who believed in Islam believed the same way as cultural Christians, that it would play no role and one would moreover never be able to feel it, because the foreign faith and culture would quickly become just like us.
In 1996 there were fewer than 50. Yesterday up toward 18,000 walked through Copenhagen, if one takes the organisers' own figure. That is an increase of at least 35,900 percent in under thirty years. Or around 21 percent per year, year after year, a doubling every third or fourth year. Now anyone understands that numbers mean something, for it is numbers that determine when a presence becomes an order.
And the direction lies fixed enough that anyone can take a pencil and extrapolate it fairly precisely across just this century, if nothing real changes in the way we meet it. It requires no prophecy. It requires only that one extends the line we already stand on.
So the question that must be asked is not to Islam.
Just as it is not to Muslims.
It is to Europe.
Whether we want it?
Whether we will let it continue?
Whether this is how it should be?
For it will not be different. And there is no prospect it ever will be. So if someone and something must be altered - then it is us.
We could for example decide to meet an unchangeable force like Islam with the same degree of unchangeability. Simply mirror what arrives.
"Yes. There is how there is here. And there is no room for what is there. That is it. And it will not be different. Just as Islam will not be different."
That would be to meet it adult, at eye level and on the premise it arrives with. And then see what happens.
For it is not a question one negotiates with a force that has openly said what it wants, and which is built not to be able to say otherwise. It is not a conversation one should - or can - have with them. Faith's architecture prevents it.
It is a conversation with ourselves.
And it is the one we keep postponing.
And therefore I did not think it was worth writing about. Now I have done so anyway.
Islam knows what it wants. It has known it for 1,400 years. The only will that has not yet decided is ours.
And it will probably not be different as long as we keep voting Mr. and Mrs. It'll-Be-Fine forward to the front seat in Christiansborg.
☀️
So. Yes.
❤️🔥🪽
Good weekend, friends.
And enjoy the summer heat. I myself am off to a summer party with loud music - so if I write or respond later, then take my answers for what they are. Filled with sunshine, blue water and all good things that can be poured too much of into the head. 😊❤
