Mick Hartley

There’s an interesting interview at Quillette with philosopher Benedict Beckeld on the subject of oikophobia. No, not a fear of oiks – understandable though that may be – but a term first coined by Roger Scruton, from the Greek oikos for home, meaning a fear or hatred of one’s own culture. The opposite, then, of xenophobia. Beckeld has written a book about it – Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations.

He talks about Islam in the West. Should we insist on assimilation? Those on the left say no – assimilation to what?

Yes. But leftists say that because they have so thoroughly destroyed the idea of a unified culture — the idea of a cultural identity, at least a Western cultural identity. They’re perfectly fine with other cultural identities, of course, but they’ve so destroyed that idea that of course it’s easy for them to say, “Well, what does that even mean?” But they can’t destroy it and then complain that it doesn’t mean anything, because they’re the ones who destroyed it.

But for those of us who still have a very clear-eyed view of what our cultural identity is, I think it’s quite easy to define. And that’s something we should insist upon. The fact that we don’t is a result of this weakening of our immune system through oikophobia. Islam is not assimilable to our culture. There are perfectly cogent philosophical arguments to be made for this. But our oikophobia forces us to run away from what is actually a quite clear conclusion: that it’s not assimilable and there’s not even a point in trying.

What about Jews then?

Jews are part of the West in a way that Islam is not. Judaism is foundational to the West, along with Christianity and along with Greece and Rome. That is the West. So to say that Jews need to be assimilated into the West is a category error, because Jews were always there. Obviously it’s going to matter a little bit from country to country — it would be easier for Jews, at least once upon a time, to assimilate into the Netherlands, Britain, or the United States, which have historically been quite friendly to Jews, than into a number of other countries, especially in Eastern Europe — though nowadays it’s more the opposite, if anything.

So it varies a bit from country to country, but the question of assimilating Jews is a completely different kind of question. It’s simply a question of whether Jews are going to preserve their own identity. That’s more of an internal Jewish question — Jews have to decide whether they want to preserve a semblance of their Jewish identity. But if they choose to do that — and I would encourage them to — that’s still perfectly compatible within the framework of the Western countries in which they live. Because Judaism, as a religion, is not antagonistic to the secular state in the way that Islam is. So that’s a much easier question….

One could talk about this for a long time. But basically the three main reasons I offered for why Islam is not compatible with the West and cannot be assimilated — and again, you can find individual Muslims who don’t take their religion so seriously and who can be assimilated, but certainly on a mass level it’s not possible.

The first reason is the fact that Islam is a political construct. In the West, we tend to think of religion as something private — that’s mainly a result of our Protestant heritage, the idea of private communion between oneself and God.

Judaism, in this case, is actually a bit closer to Islam in the sense that it’s a more total system that kind of encapsulates everything. But whereas Judaism has a political element, it’s not proselytising. And Christianity — there are different Christianities, but Christianity is proselytising yet has a much weaker political element. Islam is noxious and not assimilable because it has both the proselytising and the political aspect. And so if we have a large number of Muslims in our Western societies, they will not just practise their religion privately — they will in fact change all of the institutions of our society. The government will change, the judiciary will change, educational institutions will change, everything will change. That’s the first reason.

The second reason is that there is no hierarchy of exegesis in Islam in the same sense as in Judaism. There is broad agreement in Judaism about what certain biblical passages mean. The example I offered in that conversation was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” — the famous verse in the Torah. There is broad rabbinical agreement that this is not a lex talionis — you knock my teeth out, I get to knock yours out — but rather that you have to pay me damages. There’s broad agreement on this.

Whereas in Islam, when interpreting the Quran, you do have some interpreters who take a more peaceful view, but you also have many who take a more literal and violent view, who take the words at their bare meaning. And the point is there’s no overarching authority about which reading is correct, which means that extremist preachers — of which there are plenty — have room to spread their views without anyone being able to say: “Those people are wrong, those people are marginalised.” No, because their views are considered just as legitimate as anyone else’s. Such scholarly differences in Judaism were settled by rabbinical and scholarly debate. In Islam, they were settled by the sword — which ultimately means they were not settled at all….

Christianity is also just more peaceful in general. When we’re interpreting verses in the New Testament, the things being debated and disagreed upon are entirely different from Islamic scripture. Christianity did start as a pacifist religion — it’s worth remembering that, even though it subsequently and often did not live up to that in practice. But it did start as a pacifist religion, which was never the case with Islam.

And that leads us to the third reason: the Arab tribalism that was part of the birth of Islam. That is somewhat ironic, because Islam has universal aspirations and yet remains very tribal. You know: me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against the foreigner; and so on…..

That tribalism has been weakened somewhat in those parts of the Islamic world that are not Arab, but it persists even there to some degree. And that tribalism makes them less amenable to differing interpretations, because in that culture things were generally settled by the sword — it was an illiterate culture for a long time. Those are the three main reasons, and they aren’t going away anytime soon, which is why Islam does not fit with the West.

Can Islam be reformed?

Not while still remaining Islam. Because you would have to address the exegetical problem — you couldn’t simply decide, even as a separate community, to adopt a peaceful interpretation of certain Quranic passages when there is no authority to enforce that reading. And of course that does already exist to some degree. But the harder part, I think, would be getting rid of the political construct within Islam: the idea that a state is only legitimate if it is an Islamic state. Because that is such a core tenet. There have been Muslims who have disagreed with this — and in that sense a kind of reformation already exists. But for the reasons I mentioned, I think it would be incredibly difficult for that reformation to gain the upper hand.

These are extracts from a much longer interview. Worth reading in full if you have a Quillette account.