The sunset of the West and Islām. From US bombs to the return of the Taliban
Commentary: In a society such as ours in full social and environmental deterioration, people of faith are tolerating the system that hosts them
Giancarlo Elia Valori
| 26/08/2021
Photo: 1st Lt. Jason Uhlig
With regard to the issue of Islamic proselytism in Europe, where some countries (Belgium, Great Britain, France, etc.) have large minorities of Muslim believers - who, according to many, should be Americanized with sheriff's hats, miniskirts and reducing the faith to smartphone apps - some clarifications must be made regarding the ignorance that leads newspapers, television and social networks to absolutely not understand what Islām is, i.e. a religion that does not look at races, but aims at the universalism of the God of Abraham.
The Muslim law is a legal science of ancient tradition based on the Holy Koran. Islām is a religious, political and legal system of a reality that is a whole: dogmatic, moral, ritual, pertaining to private and public law (according to our Roman law categories).
A whole - as said above - stemming from the same sacred sources and bearing the overall name of šarī'a (following the straight path revealed by God), which, being based on the Old and New Testament (prophets of Islām: Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mary, Muhammad), can be "translated" correctly into religious law of divine origin.
This is of absolute importance and it must be kept in mind - as a peculiarity of Islām - that this religion regulates - with very detailed positive precepts - every manifestation of the life of believers, even in those areas that might appear to be the farthest from the field of religion, according to the parameters of secularism.
The science of law ('ilm al-fiqh) according to the Muslim jurists (fuqahā', sing. faqīh) has a first bipartition in the sources of law (usul al-fiqh, sing. asl al-fiqh): the Koran, the Sunnah (ahadīt, sing. hadīt: sayings of the Prophet), the ijmā' or consensus of the community (ummah) and the qiyās or deductive analogy.
The šarī'a, in turn, is divided into 'ibādat and mu'āmalat. The former includes the five pillars of faith: acceptance of God, daily prayer, legal almsgiving, fasting and abstinence until sunset in the month of Ramadān (9th), pilgrimage to Mecca and its surroundings in the month of Dû l-Hijja (12th). The second covers all other aspects of the social, economic and political life of the community, and can be adapted to the varying needs of times and places, provided the results do not deviate from the word and spirit of the šarī'a itself.
Prof. Giorgio Vercellin (1950-2007) recalled that Westerners have always pretended not to see this fact, for contingent interests, first of colonial expansion - in trying to impose their own laws and exploit territories - and then of attempted internal assimilation (cancellation of national and fideistic individuality), and
«in essence, therefore, the Muslim world, and particularly the Islamic Near East (and in the manuals there is no trace of the presence of numerous and active Christian and Jewish communities in those territories over the centuries) is described as having an autonomous history worthy of attention only in the remote past. It is not by chance that the pages on Muhammad and his immediate successors follow the much more copious pages describing the Persians – i.e. the Achaemenids - the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, etc. In other words, Islam and the Muslim world are presented on the same "archaeological" level (and therefore devoid of evolution until today) as the ancient Greeks and Romans. [...] The real crux is that the Society of Italian Historians has considered the "Muslim world", so to speak, automatically as part of the "ancient world"».
Instead, it is contemporary and present. Muslims are men and women of faith, and for them religion is also pure lawfulness. Islām is not just a confession, but a culture, a multicontinental and cross-sectoral civilization, a way of life in which the relationship with the divinity is spiritual and temporal at the same time.
The history of Western thought, from the age of Enlightenment to the present day, is marked by the conflict between faith and science: there is a constant loss of ground of the areas of influence of religion in favor of the side hegemonized by technology.
By this we mean secularization, rationalization, relativism, etc. The most striking manifestation of all this is the recognition of the right to 'believe' but also to 'not believe'. Tout court, it is the right to atheism, which Muslim jurisprudence - which, as seen above, is identified with faith - does not admit and which the West tries to impose with the violence of American weapons and with the soppy and cloying European do-goodism and political correctness. Whatever some well-meaning sociologists may say, Islam does not distinguish between religion and politics, between confession and law.
The trend that is being strengthened in the Islamic world consists in a reaffirmation of both regulations and general Shariah principles, which have been established either through legislation or as a practice in Muslim and Islamic countries, i.e. the places from where migrants come.
In the Islamic tradition, the principle that Islām as such must be both religion and State (dīn wa-dawla wa duniyā), and that the term secularism ('ilmaniyya) is synonymous with atheism, materialism, permissiveness, moral decadence, etc., is fundamental, especially in the countries allied with the West (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, etc.), and in those which are not allied with it. In each of them the institutional presence of other faiths is rarely allowed - and this from a purely legal viewpoint.
The illusion with which weak-minded or mean-minded people (to say the least) and others pursue the so-called multiculturalism has no basis in the experience and beliefs of the other party. Therefore, imagining a Muslim who adheres to the canons and principles of the liberal system - which is atheist insofar as it turns faith from a value into a subjective choice or into an "evangelical" sociological solution and welfarism for the desperate or destitute people - is a deadly naivety: a historical suicide on the part of a society that no longer has anything to offer and on the part of a production system that is leading the planet to destruction.
Any person, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, who puts forward his or her own viewpoint - either in writing or in a speech, which subsumes his or her thinking - clearly believes it to be right and true, and does not accept - on principle - a contrary or different opinion.
It is practically the parallel of a Westerner who, for various reasons, moves to a Muslim country and ex abrupto denies his way of thinking and living. Sometimes you do not understand whether this candid hope is the result of the Westerner’s ignorance or, worse, the absolute malice of a few, since cheap and profitable workforce and caregivers are much more needed than ethics, respect and safety and security of our citizens.
This shows that it is not the West that tolerates the Muslim presence in Europe, but the opposite. In a society such as ours - in full social and environmental deterioration (see the Laudato si' by Pope Francis), which has denied the sacred and has mixed genders; which is based on consumerism, servitude to money, exasperation of profit, the race for the useless, the triumph of technologicism, the race for pleasure, hedonism, the reduction of the ruling class and of politicians to zero; which has relegated women to the role of sexual icons and has reduced the sense of heroism to fiction; a society in which liberal-free market thinking generates embarrassing choices - the believers, including Catholics, Christians in toto, Jews and Muslims here, are instead tolerating the system that hosts them.
This is proved by the fact that the criminal horrors and atrocities we witnessed on November 13, 2015 were carried out by an infinitesimal percentage of Muslims present on our continent - on top of it, European citizens and not emigrants, i.e. legal children of those States where they committed crimes. It is not for me to explain why they have done so. In a millennium and a half, what has been happening for the last sixteen years, since the "humanitarian" bombs began to devastate the Afghanistan of the Taliban in the past and of the Taliban today, has never happened.
Professor Valori is President of the International World Group
Commentary: In a society such as ours in full social and environmental deterioration, people of faith are tolerating the system that hosts them
Photo: 1st Lt. Jason Uhlig
With regard to the issue of Islamic proselytism in Europe, where some countries (Belgium, Great Britain, France, etc.) have large minorities of Muslim believers - who, according to many, should be Americanized with sheriff's hats, miniskirts and reducing the faith to smartphone apps - some clarifications must be made regarding the ignorance that leads newspapers, television and social networks to absolutely not understand what Islām is, i.e. a religion that does not look at races, but aims at the universalism of the God of Abraham.
The Muslim law is a legal science of ancient tradition based on the Holy Koran. Islām is a religious, political and legal system of a reality that is a whole: dogmatic, moral, ritual, pertaining to private and public law (according to our Roman law categories).
A whole - as said above - stemming from the same sacred sources and bearing the overall name of šarī'a (following the straight path revealed by God), which, being based on the Old and New Testament (prophets of Islām: Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mary, Muhammad), can be "translated" correctly into religious law of divine origin.
This is of absolute importance and it must be kept in mind - as a peculiarity of Islām - that this religion regulates - with very detailed positive precepts - every manifestation of the life of believers, even in those areas that might appear to be the farthest from the field of religion, according to the parameters of secularism.
The science of law ('ilm al-fiqh) according to the Muslim jurists (fuqahā', sing. faqīh) has a first bipartition in the sources of law (usul al-fiqh, sing. asl al-fiqh): the Koran, the Sunnah (ahadīt, sing. hadīt: sayings of the Prophet), the ijmā' or consensus of the community (ummah) and the qiyās or deductive analogy.
The šarī'a, in turn, is divided into 'ibādat and mu'āmalat. The former includes the five pillars of faith: acceptance of God, daily prayer, legal almsgiving, fasting and abstinence until sunset in the month of Ramadān (9th), pilgrimage to Mecca and its surroundings in the month of Dû l-Hijja (12th). The second covers all other aspects of the social, economic and political life of the community, and can be adapted to the varying needs of times and places, provided the results do not deviate from the word and spirit of the šarī'a itself.
Prof. Giorgio Vercellin (1950-2007) recalled that Westerners have always pretended not to see this fact, for contingent interests, first of colonial expansion - in trying to impose their own laws and exploit territories - and then of attempted internal assimilation (cancellation of national and fideistic individuality), and
«in essence, therefore, the Muslim world, and particularly the Islamic Near East (and in the manuals there is no trace of the presence of numerous and active Christian and Jewish communities in those territories over the centuries) is described as having an autonomous history worthy of attention only in the remote past. It is not by chance that the pages on Muhammad and his immediate successors follow the much more copious pages describing the Persians – i.e. the Achaemenids - the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, etc. In other words, Islam and the Muslim world are presented on the same "archaeological" level (and therefore devoid of evolution until today) as the ancient Greeks and Romans. [...] The real crux is that the Society of Italian Historians has considered the "Muslim world", so to speak, automatically as part of the "ancient world"».
Instead, it is contemporary and present. Muslims are men and women of faith, and for them religion is also pure lawfulness. Islām is not just a confession, but a culture, a multicontinental and cross-sectoral civilization, a way of life in which the relationship with the divinity is spiritual and temporal at the same time.
The history of Western thought, from the age of Enlightenment to the present day, is marked by the conflict between faith and science: there is a constant loss of ground of the areas of influence of religion in favor of the side hegemonized by technology.
By this we mean secularization, rationalization, relativism, etc. The most striking manifestation of all this is the recognition of the right to 'believe' but also to 'not believe'. Tout court, it is the right to atheism, which Muslim jurisprudence - which, as seen above, is identified with faith - does not admit and which the West tries to impose with the violence of American weapons and with the soppy and cloying European do-goodism and political correctness. Whatever some well-meaning sociologists may say, Islam does not distinguish between religion and politics, between confession and law.
The trend that is being strengthened in the Islamic world consists in a reaffirmation of both regulations and general Shariah principles, which have been established either through legislation or as a practice in Muslim and Islamic countries, i.e. the places from where migrants come.
In the Islamic tradition, the principle that Islām as such must be both religion and State (dīn wa-dawla wa duniyā), and that the term secularism ('ilmaniyya) is synonymous with atheism, materialism, permissiveness, moral decadence, etc., is fundamental, especially in the countries allied with the West (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, etc.), and in those which are not allied with it. In each of them the institutional presence of other faiths is rarely allowed - and this from a purely legal viewpoint.
The illusion with which weak-minded or mean-minded people (to say the least) and others pursue the so-called multiculturalism has no basis in the experience and beliefs of the other party. Therefore, imagining a Muslim who adheres to the canons and principles of the liberal system - which is atheist insofar as it turns faith from a value into a subjective choice or into an "evangelical" sociological solution and welfarism for the desperate or destitute people - is a deadly naivety: a historical suicide on the part of a society that no longer has anything to offer and on the part of a production system that is leading the planet to destruction.
Any person, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, who puts forward his or her own viewpoint - either in writing or in a speech, which subsumes his or her thinking - clearly believes it to be right and true, and does not accept - on principle - a contrary or different opinion.
It is practically the parallel of a Westerner who, for various reasons, moves to a Muslim country and ex abrupto denies his way of thinking and living. Sometimes you do not understand whether this candid hope is the result of the Westerner’s ignorance or, worse, the absolute malice of a few, since cheap and profitable workforce and caregivers are much more needed than ethics, respect and safety and security of our citizens.
This shows that it is not the West that tolerates the Muslim presence in Europe, but the opposite. In a society such as ours - in full social and environmental deterioration (see the Laudato si' by Pope Francis), which has denied the sacred and has mixed genders; which is based on consumerism, servitude to money, exasperation of profit, the race for the useless, the triumph of technologicism, the race for pleasure, hedonism, the reduction of the ruling class and of politicians to zero; which has relegated women to the role of sexual icons and has reduced the sense of heroism to fiction; a society in which liberal-free market thinking generates embarrassing choices - the believers, including Catholics, Christians in toto, Jews and Muslims here, are instead tolerating the system that hosts them.
This is proved by the fact that the criminal horrors and atrocities we witnessed on November 13, 2015 were carried out by an infinitesimal percentage of Muslims present on our continent - on top of it, European citizens and not emigrants, i.e. legal children of those States where they committed crimes. It is not for me to explain why they have done so. In a millennium and a half, what has been happening for the last sixteen years, since the "humanitarian" bombs began to devastate the Afghanistan of the Taliban in the past and of the Taliban today, has never happened.
Professor Valori is President of the International World Group
