I’ve been reading The Path Of The Martyrs, Ed West’s excellent account of the eighth-century defeat of the army of Islam by the Franks, under Charles Martel. (The turning point, as I’m sure you know, was the Battle of Tours, in 732.) That shining moment was arguably the birth of the great Christian civilization of Europe that subsequently rose to towering magnificence, and endured until the 1900s — a span of 1,200 years.
It’s hard, though, to read this book without reflecting on where matters stand now — not only in fallen Europe, but right here at home, where America’s greatest city has just elected a radical Muslim mayor.
Islam never rests, and its implacable aim is to bring all of the world into the dar al-Islam: the “House of Submission”. And wherever there are still infidels who resist, that is the dar al-Harb: the “House of War”.
As I wrote in these pages many years ago:
The problem for the West, and for “moderate” Muslims living here, is that Islam has a perpetual, self-renewing wellspring of fundamentalism at its core. That there may always be some more liberal and secular Muslims at the fringes of the Ummah, and rifts within Islam itself over who is an apostate and who isn’t, is irrelevant.
What matters is that due to the unique nature and origins of Islam there has always been, and will always be, a powerful and persistent gravitational pull away from modernizing reforms, and toward fundamentalism — and this will always be a source of tension and conflict wherever there are large communities of Muslims living in the West.
We must not overlook the essential fact that to stress the importance of bringing the entire world under submission to Allah is not some sort of fringe viewpoint held only by “radical Islamists” but is in fact the overarching, central mission of Islam, explicitly stated again and again and again throughout the Koran. (Indeed, the majority of the Koran is dedicated not to the practice of the faith, but to how to deal with the kuffar.) An expansionist attitude regarding the Muslim faith isn’t “Islamism”: it’s just Islam.
As it was at Tours in 732, so it is in Europe today. And so it is in New York, in Minneapolis, and in a growing number of places all over America.
We in the West are living, just as we have been since the seventh century, in the dar al-Harb. And we had better wake up.