Social Matter

Islam vs. islam seems redundant or banal. It’s neither. Rather, it’s a division which cuts through the endless, rehashed op-eds we have to suffer through every time some Muslim or Muslim-presenting individual blows up, throws acid, takes hostages, or kills.

The semantics is a dream for the labyrinth operator. Smoke and mirrors allow celebrity columnists-of-the-day to obfuscate in 600-800 word bits by (1) appealing to Islam in the abstract, and (2) citing a few leaders who expertly hand-wave and disavow violence.

Islam is a religion of peace, and so on.

For the second point, the columnist usually throws in a link to a news piece by a run-of-the-mill progressive who interviewed a leader of a non-profit organization dedicated to sanitizing Islam. Prog media outlets have good relationships with Muslim orgs, and so the Islamic sanitizers will establish contact with prog journalists to feed them statements in advance, while refusing to return calls from other outlets. The piece takes the same form every time, and every time, readers walk away in a dazed-like state, not really convinced, but not fully capable of fighting the progwash, either.

Throughout all the editorials, the running theme is that religion is a capital-R phenomenon, that is, Religion is nothing more than a set of doctrines filed away in book form or held by a particular subset of scholars who argue that X behavior isn’t part of a religion because that’s not what our prog-baptized-exegetical-method derives from the book. To repeat, the underlying assumption here is that religion-stuff is made by building words on top of each other to form a doctrine, and then when you have a doctrine-thing, you have a religion.

Wrong, wrong. Religion is history, religion is culture, myths, rites, practices, and structure.

The delusion of Religion as Doctrine leads to constant bafflement in the public sphere, particularly in response to the idea that if Christianity has some public policy privilege, it’s ipso facto illegitimate unless equally applied to the long line of religious grifters waiting for their slice: Jedis, and other cocked up ‘religions.’

Back to the main point: Islam vs. islam. Doctrine has its place, but if we take seriously the idea of religion as an empirical phenomenon for study, trying to map the religion of Islam onto islam is reminiscent of a child trying to stick disjointed shapes into the wrong box space. It just won’t go. It won’t fit. Islam and islam have a similar veneer. They’re certainly cladistically related.

But when Western Islamic authorities speak about Islam, they must be referring to something else. It’s an Islam foreign to the experience of those in the UK, of those in Scandinavian countries, and especially foreign to anyone outside the western world, where islam doesn’t need to hold to any surface-level pretensions to a sanitized Islam. Official proclamations are so manifestly distinct from islam that it makes sense to conceptually separate the two. Islam and islam, or thedelam, thede-islam, what have you. It’s ugly and a sin against style, but I needed something, and I’m all out of sexy neologisms. At Social Matter, thede-based analysis is just as important as purely conceptual analysis to understanding phenomena.

Western Islam only exists in small pockets of the western world, in universities and front organizations. Of the world’s total Muslim population, how many belong to Islam, and how many belong to islam? An empirical survey of western-islamic relations obliterates the claptrap paraded about in op-eds. The empirical record is clear. Thedelam is the complete rejection of the West, and the fact that there’s cross-pollination of a few select values is irrelevant. Thedelam is primarily for Arabs, which is why it’s made strong inroads into Northern half of the African continent, where it takes advantage of Arabic admixture. Memeplexes don’t port nicely to other hardware, and when the thedelam memeplex arrives in the West, it provides a Strong Horse conduit for the actions of disaffected, radical whites, who look for validation of their disorders.

Endless arguments about ‘what Islam is’ are entirely beside the point—islam is what it does and it does what muslims believe, and it doesn’t matter a damn bit what Official Islam has to say about it. Yet, the nation’s best and brightest columnists still manage to think that the coup de grâce is as simple as: ‘that’s not Islam.’

First rule: always be suspicious if a single argument does that much work. It’s really not that easy. But let’s grant Islam as Properly Conceived (which looks suspiciously like a prog wet dream) for the sake of argument. What follows? What changes, exactly? Nothing. The world’s ‘Muslims’ are still muslims, not Muslims.

Religion as Doctrine is why the Australian Prime Minister feels comfortable saying that ISIS has nothing to do with any religion. He’s wrong, but thedelam isn’t exactly monolithic, either; it represents one offshoot of islam, an offshoot which is very closely related and attracts sympathy from many of the other parts of islam too scared to dive into the deep end. Not every muslim on the street is scheming to behead you, but they might favorite ISIS tweets and provide cover. They might push for Sharia law.

And they almost certainly will encroach culturally.