Given the rising tide of Islam everywhere in the West, and the suicidal ignorance and unwisdom of bien-pensant liberals and useful idiots even at this late hour, I’ll repost a link to Edward Feser’s outstanding 2016 article explaining in thorough and lucid detail why Islam and Western society are utterly, irremediably (and lethally, if we don’t wise up) incompatible.
An excerpt:
Muhammad’s kingdom, unlike Christ’s, was from the start very definitely of this world, and his servants certainly fought. And unlike the Church during the first centuries of Christianity, Islam was not in a weak position relative to the state. That is not because Islam controlled the state. It is because Islam was the state. The caliphate was not a secular power over which Islam had acquired an influence, not a state to which a distinct Islamic “Church” had been annexed. It was “Church” and state in one. Or rather, it was all just Islam, because there is in Islam no such thing in the first place as the notion of a “Church” understood as a purely religious institution, which might be distinguished from some other institution called “the state,” to which it may or may not be fused.
It is a fundamental error, then, to try to understand Islam or its history on the model of the relationship between Church and state in Christian history. To do so — and to suggest on the basis of this analogy that the separation between Church and state that liberalism achieved might be duplicated in the Muslim context — is simply to ignore the actual history of Islam (and, ironically, to impose alien Western categories on Islam in the very act of trying to defend it against its Western critics). It is particularly absurd to propose, as some Western liberals do, a “separation of mosque and state,” as if the notion of the mosque were the Islamic equivalent of the notion of the Church. For one thing, the word “church” is ambiguous in English. It can mean a certain kind of building, or it can mean the Church as an institution, distinct from other institutions like the state, the family, a business corporation, etc. There is no parallel ambiguity in the word “mosque.” It’s just a building. For another thing, it is not a building devoted merely to what Westerners think of as purely religious affairs. Rather, it is a place wherein the Muslim preacher might also just as well discuss politics, culture, economics, etc. — because, again, these are all just as much a part of the concerns of Islam as purely religious matters are.
I’ve been writing about this myself for ages. From 2010 (as quoted in a post from 2015):
In the view of much of the Muslim world, and of a great many influential Muslim scholars, such “moderate”, “Westernized” Muslims are heretics and apostates.
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.
While we tear ourselves apart here in the dar al-Harb, the Ummah is consolidating its position. It will say what it needs to; it will stick to taqqiya and dawa jihad as long as it is still relatively weak within our borders. But the plan never changes, and when the time is right, the trap will close.
Read Dr. Feser’s essay here.