Renouncing jihad

As a follow-up to my earlier post on how Islam in Europe is being eroded by the growing power of cultural assimilation, here's a must-read article by Johann Hari, illustrating how even some of the very worst -- violent jihadists -- are falling prey to the same phenomenon, at least in Britain. In case after case, men sworn to kill or die for the future global Caliphate gradually realized that the advanced and humane society around them was not the realm of evil they had been taught, while strict-Islamist revolution had brought only cruelty, violence, and backwardness everywhere on Earth where it had succeeded. Now they work against jihadism, using the knowledge gained while they were part of the movement.

It must be said -- which I think Hari does not emphasize enough -- that an important role has been played by tougher state policy against the worst rabble-rousers. Hari notes that the reason why Anjem Choudary now has such a high profile in Britain is that he's the last of his kind; over the last decade all the other major public preachers of jihadism in Britain have been arrested or deported. Without the cabal of fanatical leaders from the nineties to inspire and intimidate, doubt has been able to spread and be expressed among the rank and file.

It must also be said that moderation is not a permanent solution to the threat of Islam in Europe. Moderate and peaceful Muslims certainly exist, but moderate and peaceful Islam is an illusion; the Koran and Hadîth make it clear that the real Islam is the Islam of al-Qâ'idah and the Taliban, and ultimately anyone who still calls himself a Muslim at all must confront this. In the long run only de-Islamization can eliminate the threat. Yet those who recoil from jihadism have at least taken a first step down that road; and if talk of "non-literal" interpretations allows them to renounce violence and work to defeat those who still embrace violence, then even if theologically unsound, it must be considered a practical good.