Does Khan's Election Denote The Apostasy Of The West?

[Khandro]

Unthinkable at any time in British history, but it's been allowed to happen.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2016/apostasy-wests-hope

[vetuste_ennemi]

You presented your "spiritual vacuum" argument in an earlier thread, Khandro. It was the one where you mentioned Kilpatrick's "Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West". This book explains very clearly why Islamic ideology is incompatible with Western democracy. It is spot on, too, when it says that multiculturalism and cultural relativism have assisted the spread of Islam and blinded the West to the threat that that expansion poses. But I disagree with Kilpatrick's and your attributing the West's apparent commitment to cultural suicide to the rise of "secular atheism". The rise of Islam has happened not because the West has lost its faith, but because it has lost its wits.

Why and how the the elites of the West have come to embrace the self-contradictions of multiculturalism I don't know, but multiculturalism isn't something you catch when you become an atheist, although it's possible, I suppose, to catch atheism when you become a multiculturalist. Once multiculturalism is embraced an important critical faculty is lost - the ability to conceive that some cultures may be not only different from, but objectively superior to others, and that various cultures may be to some degree incompatible with each other. This in my opinion is what has caused the spiritual vacuum you talk about: "we" no longer have pride in our cultural inheritance, and having no pride in it "we" have nothing to defend, nothing to invite others to share. You call this apostasy; I call it la trahison des clercs. I am happy, however, to borrow the religious metaphor from Kilpatrick's title: the West has lost its soul.

I'm an atheist who is not part of the "we". Two other such are my favourite Spectator columnists Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray. But I think you know that.

What Khan's London will look like in four years time we'll find out in due course.

[Khandro]

v_e; I endorse what you say, though we may differ on the reason for "the spiritual vacuum" in much of contemporary 'western' society.
It is clear that no such vacuum exists in Islam and this is one reason they are gaining such ground, which we ignore at our peril.
I'm reading 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' by Niel MacGregor (Highly Recommended); 'Object 46, Gold Coins of Abd Al-Malik, minted AD 696-697', in which he touches on the history of the caliphate;
"Today there is no caliph. The title was long claimed by the Turkish sultans, but the office was abolished in 1924. A universally accepted caliph has been a rare thing, but the dream of a single Islamic empire - a caliphate - remains potent in the Islamic world."

He then quotes the social anthropologist, Prof. Madawi al-Rasheed;

"[many] Muslims today, aspire to this ideal of the caliphate as the embodiment of the Muslim community. It is related to the spread of the internet, of new communication technology that allows Muslims from different backgrounds to imagine some kind of relationship with other Muslims, regardless of their culture language or ethnic group. So it can be found in second-generation Muslims in Britain, let's say, those who have lost the cultural background of their parents and have developed linkages to other Muslims of their age ..... It aspires towards a global identity, an identity where you have bonds based on belief rather than ethnic background or even nationality."

So there is a sense where multiculturalism does exist within Islam itself, the cement holding it together being the religion.

Where is "our" cement I ask?

[Khandro]

fender; Sunnis and Shias have lived side by side in many places for centuries, even intermarrying and praying in the same mosques. Fundamental extremism is at the root of the violence being carried out between the different factions in the middle east today, but they are all Muslims before being anything else.