Two universalisms that can’t see each other

“Islam is not just meant for some people. It is the true religion for all people at all times.”
Steve Centanni, Gaza Strip, August 2006, reading the statement prepared for him by his Muslim captors.

“Jefferson did not write that [about the right to freedom] just for white people but for all people, not just for America but for all countries, not just for one time but for all times.”
Jack Kemp, C-SPAN, 1996.

Western democratists believe that democracy is a universal truth, so that the Muslims who reject it must do so because they’re “dead-enders,” the losers of history. As democratists see it, Muslims have no vision of their own. They simply hate our freedoms, and therefore it’s only a matter of time before they see the truth of democracy and love our freedoms. Muslims are reformable, because Islam has no real substance of its own; the only thing that is real is the equal democratic rights of all people.

What the democratists fail to recognize is that Islam also claims to be a universal truth. And since Islam is a universal truth, Muslims have the same universalist myopia as the democratists. These two universalist beliefs are unable to recognize each other’s existence, because each side would then have to recognize that it is not as universal as it thinks, or at least that its claims to universality face serious competition. So, for Muslims, Western democratists are perverse and evil opponents of the one and only truth of Islam, while, for Western democratists, Muslims (or Islamic radicals or whatever) are backward and bigoted opponents of the one and only truth of democracy. Neither side can recognize a subjectivity—an embodied view of the world—that exists outside its own sphere.

As long as we fail to understand the universal claims of Islam, we will never be able to develop a realistic strategy to defend ourselves from it, because, one, we will keep imagining that its opposition to us is merely a negative reaction against our values rather than a positive assertion of Islamic values, and, two, believing that Islam has no positive substance of its own, we will imagine that we can reform it or perhaps eliminate it altogether. But once we recognize Islam for what it is, a universalist belief system to which Muslims are profoundly attached, then we will be able to take effective action against it, namely, through our political, cultural, and military supremacy, to confine it permanently to a limited region of the earth where it will have no opportunity to carry out its universalist agenda.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 01, 2006 02:01 PM | Send