The recent defections of Nadhim Zahawi, Robert Jenrick, and Suella Braverman from the Tories to Reform have caused quite a stir – among both supporters and opponents – yet seemingly for the wrong reasons.
In theory, a political start-up winning the endorsement of a former Chancellor sounds like great news. It certainly looks good on paper. The support of a former high-ranking official potentially brings much-needed insider knowledge and some personal clout to the table.
Unfortunately, this endorsement isn’t just good on paper – it’s only good on paper. Despite it being his defining credential, Nadhim Zahawi was Chancellor for barely two months before being shuffled away under Liz Truss – probably for the best, all things considered.
Nothing of note was achieved during his brief internship at the Treasury. Zahawi’s tenure reminds us of a period of politics rather than any policy – specifically, the end of the last Conservative government; the unpopularity of which continues to contaminate the party’s standing with the public years later.
If Zahawi is known for anything of substance, it’s for being Vaccines minister; at best, some may recall him as a vaguely competent manager of the rollout, while others regard him as a sinister bio-authoritarian technocrat – most notably, the Reform voters who kept the party afloat during Lockdown, when it was jostling for third place with the Liberal Democrats.
Of course, he wasn’t just any Tory MP. Zahawi was among the core Cameron-era intake. When his defection was announced, commentators were quick to note his socially liberal positions, from his support for immigration – including mass amnesty for illegals – to his past support for progressive mainstays like DEI and BLM.
Moreover, his past attacks on Nigel Farage – such as comparing the Reform leader to Joseph Goebbels – and accusations of an unsuccessful bid for a Tory peerage a few months prior have all understandably created trouble for the supposed convert.
This all might sound a bit harsh. People do have Damascene conversions. However, Zahawi’s track record shows that authenticity is really not his strongest point. The day after his promotion to Chancellor under Boris Johnson – at the height of Partygate, no less – Zahawi publicly called for Johnson’s resignation. Only 48 hours earlier, he had agreed to serve in his government!
When Boris finally resigned, and Truss inevitably crashed and burned, Zahawi called for Johnson’s return to power – that is, only after support for his own leadership bid failed to materialise. Over the course of a month, Zahawi went from Boris loyalist to anti-Boris conspirator to Boris restorationist, and while people took wry enjoyment in his shamelessly serpentine manoeuvres at the time, it begs a question of loyalty now that he’s defected to Reform.
By contrast, Jenrick has been received more warmly by Reformers, although it’s hardly a match made in Heaven. Like Zahawi, he wasn’t just some Tory apparatchik. Jenrick won his Newark seat in a 2014 by-election at a time when UKIP was on-the-up and the Conservatives were under siege. Earlier in the year, UKIP beat the Tories to second place in the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election. Later in the year, it would gain seats in the Commons following by-election victories in Clacton and Rochester.
As such, Jenrick’s election to Parliament was about more than filling space on the green benches; it was explicitly about refuting the idea that the Conservatives needed to move rightward on immigration, EU membership, political correctness, etc. – taking the form of strategic ignorance than anything overtly ideological. People don’t really want less immigration, so you can afford to ignore it; just marginally improve their living standards and they’ll stop voting for populists. Sound familiar?
A triumph for full-fat Cameronism over UKIP-lite, Jenrick was hailed by the kind of progressive interlopers who now view him as the second coming of Hermann Göring. Thereafter, Jenrick was identified with the centrist wing of the party. What little he did say about immigration was vague but ultimately liberal, and that was pretty much of the end of things until a few years ago.
The official narrative around Jenrick’s conversion is that his time at the Home Office was so gruelling that it pushed him rightward. This is certainly plausible. Jenrick’s tenure was mostly defined by low-grade cost-cutting measures and monitoring the situation. His most hardline decision was arguably the removal of a Mickey Mouse mural in a migrant detention centre. Such a record just as much indicates a Home Office strangling more ambitious proposals as a minister being insufficiently opposed to migration, so it’s hardly a slam-dunk example of ideological inauthenticity.
Nevertheless, Jenrick’s conversion was impeccably well-timed and rather recent. Dropped as Housing Secretary, Jenrick was appointed as Minister for Immigration in 2022 by then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak because he wasn’t particularly right-wing; allegedly, Sunak intended Jenrick to act as a counterweight to then Home Secretary Suella Braverman… who has also defected to Reform!
Out of the Tory Trio that have defected this month, Braverman’s is perhaps the easiest and toughest to square. Her credentials are far stronger than Jenrick’s and much stronger than Zahawi’s. The European Research Group’s former chairman does seem to have genuine socially conservative convictions, and is something of a ‘Deepa Kaur‘-esque figure of both hatred and ridicule for progressives.
Many will inevitably point to her track record as Home Secretary – and specifically, her inability to get the migration numbers down and presiding over the Afghan cover-up – but this (much like Jenrick’s record as immigration minister) is a question of authenticity rather than efficacy. matters, and Braverman needs to be criticised for this before being given any portfolio of any kind, but is not the central focus here. The point being is that she can’t be faulted on rhetoric; a vice in other contexts but technically a virtue here.
Her undeniable “uselessness” as Home Secretary aside, and resolve most likely born from conviction, it’s believable that she feels at home in Reform. The fact she didn’t run in the 2024 Conservative leadership race suggests sincere alienation from her former party, and the fact that pretty much everyone saw this coming down the pipe, are surely worth something even to sceptics.
Critics will continue to use the fact these people were Conservative MPs against them – including the Conservative Party itself, it seems – but this isn’t really the issue. Danny Kruger was a Tory MP, and everyone sees him as a major asset to Reform, and rightfully so; even Dominic Cummings had nice things to say about him, and he scarcely says nice things about anyone.
Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, winners of the by-elections in Clacton and Rochester, were Tory defectors. Much of UKIP’s presence in the European Parliament was comprised of former Conservative MEPs alienated by the party’s embrace of Europhilia, including Roger Helmer – former Conservative MEP for the East Midlands and Jenrick’s rival in the Newark by-election of 2014.
If not assets, other former Tories have proven inoffensive enough. Lee Anderson has long since shaken his association with his old party – indeed, he’s done it once before. Jake Berry was obscure enough to get away with defecting. Nadine Dorries – arguably the worst defection thus far, courtesy her contribution to Online Safety Act – is made tolerable only by the likelihood that she won’t have any real power.
The simple fact of the matter is that Reform was always bound to take some Tory flotsam on board. When your modus operandi for the next decade is to supplant and replace the Tories as the main right-leaning party in Britain, it’s pretty much a given.
Rather, the problem is the reliability of Reform’s converts. To have lived a life of sin is less problematic than never converting at all; this is true of religion and it is true of politics. Farage is headed for the belly of the beast; the antibodies of the regime are going to be working overtime to make his time in Number 10 as unfruitful and frustrating as possible. If the Blob is resistant to Keir Starmer, of all people, it’s sure to have an existential hatred of Mr Brexit. The next election is scheduled for 2029, and we’re already hearing murmurs from Whitehall about how to stop Reform from within.
Now more than ever, Farage needs true believers around him, and while Brexit Braverman’s defection is intuitive, I doubt he’ll be able to rely on “The Boy from Baghdad” when he inevitably comes under fire.
The jury’s still out on Bobby J.
As we’ve seen in the United States – especially during the first Trump administration, but increasingly during the second – the recycling of staffers, advisers, and appointees can destabilise and inhibit the leader from the next layer down. Given that Reform’s success verifiably hinges on Farage’s personal capital, meaning Reform’s success in Whitehall will hinge upon Farage’s personal ability to Do Things.
One might say this is true of all governments, not merely those controlled by populists, and while this is true, it’s especially true of one plausibly (not merely technically) campaigning on the expectation of real, fundamental change; change that, at times, may wholly necessary but still deeply unpopular. The failure to match voter expectations is politics as usual, but Reform is promising exactly the opposite. Failure to translate executive will into tangible results will not only be used as ammunition by rival parties, but by the establishment (from all parties and none) and reactionaries desperately seeking to retrench it.
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Rishi Sunak: MP for Anywhere
In his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart sought to explain the Brexit vote, and the furore that followed, as a rift between two tribes in British life: ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’.
Somewheres, Goodhart explained, are traditionally-minded and attached to place. By contrast, Anywheres are cosmopolitans and attached primarily to ideals. Somewheres are often provincial and typically live in (or nearby) the communities in which they were raised. Anywheres are primarily urban and often live far from where they were raised.
For Goodhart, Brexit was a revolt of the nation’s Somewheres. Alienated by the extraordinary rate of social change in the post-Blair era, they took a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to vote against the Anywhere-dominated political establishment.Though nominally a vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, the referendum was essentially a vote of protest against the cross-party consensus on immigration.
The frustration of Somewheres is exemplified by voters in ‘The Red Wall’, a patchwork of traditionally Labour-supporting northern constituencies, who voted Tory en masse in the 2019 general election in the hope that Brexit might finally be settled and migration numbers could be reduced.
Though no less baffled than the rest of the establishment, The Conservative Party – unlike many of their fellow Anywheres – was willing to implement the referendum’s result. Ultimately, however, the failure to capitalise on the opportunities presented by Brexit, the collapse of the Red Wall, and a major electoral realignment was to define our outgoing government.
None personified this failure to understand the significance of Brexit as much as the man who was destined to lead the Conservative Party into the most recent election. This would not surprise readers of Goodhart’s work, for Rishi Sunak is Anywhere incarnate.
The hyper-conscientious child of immigrant parents who, through hard work and talent, has risen to the very apex of his profession, Sunak personifies the cosmopolitan ideals of the contemporary western elite.Sunak’s failure as Prime Minister does not reflect a lack of merit. Of the four Prime Ministers who succeeded Cameron, Sunak was probably the most capable and accomplished.
Sunak’s relationship with his heritage is interesting. Born to Ugandan-Asian parents, Sunak exemplifies the industry and drive of that entrepreneurial group of people. Teetotal and vegetarian, our erstwhile leader married outside both his caste and ethnicity – of Punjabi heritage, his wife is the only daughter of a fabulously wealthy family of south Indian origin. In this he typifies the subcontinent’s elite diaspora who, as Razib Khan writes, have globalisation ‘etched in their bones’.
His heritage aside, Sunak’s background is that of a stereotypical Tory frontbencher. A product of Winchester College (where he was Head Boy), Sunak progressed to Oxford (where he earned a 1st in PPE) and thence to Stanford (via a Fulbright Scholarship).Upon graduating, he pursued a career in high finance, first at Goldman Sachs and then at two hedge funds, the latter being based in California. Notoriously, Sunak filed US tax returns while serving as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not relinquishing his Green Card until 2021.
Having joined the Conservative Party following an internship at Central Office, Sunak became an MP in 2015, replacing William Hague as the representative for Richmond. Parachuted into Number 10 in the aftermath of the Truss debacle, Sunak proceeded to dismay colleagues with displays of poor political judgement, choosing to announce the cancellation of a trainline to Manchester while in Manchester, to cite but one of several notorious examples.
Whereas for most the office of Prime Minister represents the culmination of a long and bruising career; Sunak’s brief tenure as Prime Minister will likely represent just another impressive (though relatively ill-remunerated) entry in a glittering CV. It is safe to presume that, before the Tories are again returned to power, he and his family will decamp to California in order that he might resume his career in finance.For all the bluster about his supposedly reactionary politics, Sunak’s values align with the managerialist liberalism which dominates the contemporary Conservative Party.
The Economist describes Sunak as ‘the most right-wing Conservative leader of his generation’ and claims his ‘nerdy demeanour covers an overlooked fact… [o]n everything from social issues, devolution and the environment to Brexit and the economy, Mr Sunak is to the right of the recent Tory occupants of 10 Downing Street’, but this is merely relative.
Objectively speaking, similar to his background, Sunak’s politics are blandly Anywhere, believing that a modern economy cannot function without high levels of immigration – derived from his instinctive belief in entrepreneurial mobility – and extols ‘diversity’ as both a moral good and political virtue, even at the expense of factual accuracy.
Sunak’s support of Brexit, often cited as evidence of his right-wing convictions, is misconstrued. Sunak was no ‘Little Englander’ hoping to make Britain’s borders more restrictive. Rather, Sunak saw leaving the EU as an opportunity to further liberalise Britain’s immigration regime.
With Sunak gone, the Conservative Party is once again presented with the opportunity to reinvent itself.
For a generation or more, the Conservative Party has simply failed to take the concerns of Middle England seriously. Sunak, so removed from the concerns of ordinary British people that he didn’t think it worthwhile to attend ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day, exemplified this detachment.
If the Tory party is to regain political relevance, it must listen to the nation’s Somewheres – a constituency that remains in flux, and that the Labour Party does not speak for. The lack of enthusiasm for our incoming government is remarkable and telling. The electorate has grown tired of the Tories, but are dubious of a Labour Party who seem to offer nothing but more of the same.
So farewell, Prime Minister Sunak. We wish you well, Anywhere you go.
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The possible booster/lockdown trade-off
At the time of writing, the UK is facing a sharp rise in cases of the novel Omicron variant. As a result, after a relatively normal summer and autumn, the government has now enacted ‘Plan B’, a series of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) including mandated mask wearing as well as work-from-home and vaccine passport recommendations, all intended to slow the virus’ spread. Further, despite having previously denied having any intention of doing so, it now appears to be floating the possibility of a third national lockdown or lockdown lite, limiting indoor dining (in winter…) and socialising. Amidst this, the government’s messaging continues to be that Omicron’s defeat lies in widespread uptake of the covid vaccine’s booster dose, which is not really surprising as we had previously been warned that the emergence of new variants would likely require cycles of booster jabs. This may not seem like terribly controversial advice in a country like the UK where, up until now, vaccine acceptance has been high. However, it is naïve to assume that all those who accept the jab do so for the same reasons. And, by that token, short-sighted not to consider the negative impact that another lockdown (or indeed the mere threat of one) could have on future levels of vaccine acceptance amongst some.
Given the toxicity of vaccine discussions (consider, the boogieman figure of the antivaxxer as the epitome of wilful ignorance and callousness, even before covid), the vaccine-hesitant report being unlikely to share their reservations with vaccine-acceptant peers for fear of encountering derision or scorn. As a result, vaccine accepters seldom have to engage with anything other than a David Icke-esque caricature of vaccine hesitancy. This obscures how, far from belonging to separate realms of ‘reason and science’ and ‘irrationality and conspiracy’, vaccine attitudes exist on the same spectrum, tipped by out-and-out refusal and full acceptance, and filled in by a gamut of vaccine hesitancies. Similarly, the binary outcomes of a vaccine decision (either you get jabbed or you don’t) obscure how people with different degrees of hesitancy will opt to receive covid vaccine but, given their differing stances, may respond differently to future policy changes regarding boosters and lockdowns.
Through a study based on a series of online surveys March 15th and April 22nd, 2021, academics from Swansea University identified at least two sorts of attitude amongst accepters of the covid vaccination. Being vaccine-accepters, both had received at least one dose of a covid vaccination or indicated their intentions to do so when it was offered to them.
However, whereas ‘full-accepters’ experienced few qualms about their decision to get jabbed, often just seeing it as an extension of a well-established social-norm, ‘accept-but-unsure’ accepters were more ambivalent, thus flirting with vaccine hesitancy. Though they did accept a jab (or said they would when it came to it), they did so with some concerns about its safety and effectiveness.
In explaining their eventual decision to accept the vaccine, they emphasised a trust in science (“I was a bit suspicious… but the science today compared to years ago is outstanding isn’t it?”) and sense that, whatever their reservations, the vaccine was in some way necessary to allow for a return to ‘normality’. Vaccination was seen as “the only way forwards, to get on with our lives”. Anecdotally, I find that this certainly chimes with my experience of social media last spring when Twitter was briefly aflood with clips of fully vaccinated Israelis rediscovering the pleasures of legal public-gatherings and indoor dining, and promising a happier, freer summer than the last. More academically, surveys carried out by the ONS this
September found that 65% of previously hesitant accepters gave a desire for restrictions to ease and life to return to normal as one of their motivations for getting jabbed (interestingly, only 21% gave potential vaccine passports as one of theirs but this is another story).
Importantly, this recognition of the vaccine’s necessary role in our return to normality often involved a recognition that this was not a ‘one off’, that is, that there would in all likelihood be cycles of boosters in response to novel variants of the virus. It was largely recognised that as these emerged, we would need to continue receiving jabs to protect normal life and stave off life-destroying NPIs like lockdown.
This means that for some accepters, vaccine acceptance is a trade-off between some degree of hesitancy and a desire to see normal life resume. They got jabbed (and accepted that they would need to do so again in the future) on the understanding that this guaranteed their ability to live as before. As a result, the UK government’s re-threatening of this ability each time crisis looms may start to gnaw at these people’s levels of vaccine acceptance. If each time numbers climb my being vaccinated is not enough to protect normality from threat, the accept-but-unsure accepter might think, why should I swallow my hesitations and continue to accept the jabs? Though there are surely those who (for whatever reasons) will accept round after round of booster as necessary, even as authority continues threaten their civil society and flourishing, I think that it would be naïve to assume that this will be the case of all those who accepted the first, second and even third jab.
I do not know what the scale of this problem is, the quantitative research into various types of vaccine acceptance in the UK seems somewhat limited. However, if we are to trust government’s claim that the already limited numbers of unvaccinated people pose a significant threat to public health, whilst also seeing how they are unlikely to respond positively to coercive measures like vaccine passports, I do not see how adding to their future numbers would not be, on the government’s own terms, damaging to the effort against covid. Resorting once more to anecdote, over the last fortnight or so, I have heard more than one (generally young) person express their grumpiness at having to accept a third, and potentially fourth, jab given the limited risk the virus poses to them and the disruptions the fresh barrage of NPIs has caused in their lives. However minor this problem turns out to be, the government needs to consider the impact that their continued treatment of normality as a privilege could have on some people’s future vaccine acceptance.
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Islam as Arabism
‘Here the initiative individual […] regains his place as a formative force in history. […] If he is a prophet like Mohammed, wise in the means of inspiring men, his words may raise a poor and disadvantaged people to unpremeditated ambitions and surprising power.’
– Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of HistoryThat Islam is a sociopolitical ideology as well as a religion hardly requires demonstration. It included a political component from its very inception, since tradition has it that Muhammad was the Muslims’ worldly ruler as well as their spiritual leader. The caliphs succeeded him (‘caliph’ means ‘successor’) in that capacity: they, too, were political and religious rulers in one. If the caliphate had not been abolished in 1924, non-Muslims would likely be much less blind to Islam’s political side.
This political side is too rarely acknowledged. However, even less attention has been paid to the ethnic aspect of Islam’s politics. Hardly any commentators seem to mention the undercurrent of Arabism present in the Mohammedan creed – yet once one has noticed it, it is impossible to ignore. Islam is not just any ideology; it is a vehicle of Arab imperialism.
Some readers may not readily see any such ethnic element, but others will likely find it obvious. In Algeria, for instance, Islam is widely taken to be a facet of ‘Arabdom,’ which is why proud Berbers tend not to be passionate Muslims. It is not just non-Arabs who believe that Islam and Arabdom are intimately linked. Consider that Tunisia’s ‘Arab Muslim’ character is mentioned in the preamble to the country’s constitution. Likewise, Morocco’s constitution states that Moroccan national identity is ‘forged by the convergence of its Arab-Islamic, Amazigh and Saharan-Hassanic components.’ Such language underscores the essential connection between Arab identity and Islam. What follows is a brief overview of some aspects of this connection.
The Traditions
The traditional accounts of Islam’s early history, including the hadith, contain plenty of naked Arabism. In this context, we can largely set aside the question of whether these accounts are reliable. For the most part, it scarcely matters whether the traditions are true or fabricated; it only matters that they are believed.
Perhaps the most infamous racist hadith is the one in which Muhammad describes black people as seeming to have raisins for heads. The saying in question is Number 256 in Book 89 of volume nine of Bukhari’s anthology: ‘You should listen to and obey[…] your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin.’
Some Muslims try to divert attention from the questionable physical description and onto the statement’s supposed egalitarianism. They claim this passage expresses a progressive sentiment that people of any race could be worthy rulers. However, one should bear in mind the context: the next two hadiths likewise extol obedience to rulers. For example, Number 257 has Muhammad say: ‘A Muslim has to listen to and obey (the order of his ruler) whether he likes it or not, as long as his orders involve not one in disobedience (to Allah).’ The common theme in these stories is the requirement to submit to those in power. Against this backdrop, the hypothetical Ethiopian ruler is clearly mentioned in order to emphasise how absolute this duty is: it applies even if the ruler belongs to an inferior ethnic group. Similar examples of racism in the hadith and other Islamic sources are listed by Isaac Marshall.
As Robert Spencer shows in Did Muhammad Exist?, early Arab politics under the Abbasid dynasty was marked by references to Muhammad’s example to promote various causes, notably including ‘the rapid expansion of the Arab Empire.’ This sometimes included strong ethnic undertones. As Spencer notes, Muhammad was reported to have said that Muslims would conquer ‘the palaces of the pale men in the lands of the Byzantines’ and to have announced: ‘the Greeks will stand before the brown men (the Arabs) in troops in white garments and with shorn heads, being forced to do all that they are ordered.’ Why mention the Byzantines’ lighter complexion? Presumably, this served to underscore their ethnic distinctness (non-Arabness) and, by implication, their inferiority. As for the second quote, it clearly portrays Muhammad as having wished for the Arabs specifically, rather than Muslims of any ethnicity, to dominate the Greeks.
According to tradition, having garnered only a handful of followers in Mecca, Muhammad achieved his first major success in Yathrib (later Medina). This milestone was made possible by an ethnic conflict between Arabs and Jews in which the former deemed him useful for their cause. ‘The Arabs of Yathrib,’ explains Ali Sina in Understanding Muhammad and Muslims, ‘accepted Muhammad readily, not because of the profundity of his teachings, […] but because of their rivalry with the Jews.’ It was in Medina that Islam’s trademark Jew-hatred truly began to burgeon.
Over a millennium later, the resources of Muslims worldwide are still being drained in service to an Arab struggle against Jews in Israel – and Islam is the tool through which those resources are extracted. Of course, not everyone in the Muslim world is content with this arrangement. In Iran, which is now a mostly non-Muslim country, protestors chant: ‘Forget about Palestine, forget about Gaza, think about us.’ Likewise, the Moroccan Amazigh Democrat Party (a Berber organisation now renamed ‘Moroccan Ecologist Party – Greens’) stands for both secularism and ‘normalizing relations with Israel.’ The more a group is free from Islam, it seems, the less need it feels to sacrifice its own interests in order to help Middle Eastern Arabs re-conquer Israel.
The History
Islam’s history shows it to be, from its beginnings, fundamentally intertwined with Arab identity. In Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, Tim Mackintosh-Smith provides such manifold examples of this pattern that it would be plagiaristic to reproduce them all here. Drawing on Muslim historian al-Baladhuri’s description of the Arab conquests of the seventh century AD, he writes that the Taghlib, despite being Christian, were made exempt from the ‘poll-tax’ which unbelievers must pay under Islamic law. The reason was that the Taghlib were Arabs, and could thus make the case that they were different from the ‘conquered barbarians’ to whom the tax was normally applied. ‘Islam in its expansive period had as much to do with economics and ethnicity as with ethics.’ During the later centuries of Islam, other groups – most notably, the Ottomans – appear to take the lead in the Muslim world. Nevertheless, ‘the centuries of “invisibility” in fact conceal an Arab expansion almost as remarkable for its extent as the first eruption of Islam,’ though this second phase occurred ‘through the Arab world’s back door, into the Indian Ocean.’
For Mackintosh-Smith, Islam should be viewed ‘as a unifying national ideology, and Muhammad as an Arab national hero.’ It may be worthwhile to mention, in this context, the theory that Muhammad never existed and was instead a character popularised decades after his supposed death. Robert Spencer summarises the case for this position in Did Muhammad Exist?. Despite dating Islam’s emergence to the early eighth century, Spencer notes that two inscriptions from Arab-ruled lands during the second half of the seventh century refer to some watershed moment which had occurred in 622. As he states, this is the traditional date of the Hijra, when Muhammad supposedly fled from Mecca to Medina. Interestingly, one of the inscriptions was made 42 years (on the lunar calendar) after 622, yet it purports to have been written in ‘the year 42 following the Arabs.’ Why the odd phrasing? Spencer argues that, in 622, the Byzantines inflicted a heavy defeat on the Persian Empire, sending it into decline. The Arabs were quick to take advantage of the resultant ‘power vacuum’ and soon conquered Persia. Consequently, he speculates: ‘What became the date of the Hijra may have originally marked the beginning of the Arabians as a political force to be reckoned with on the global scene.’ If this idea is correct – and it certainly makes sense of the strange phrase ‘the year 42 following the Arabs’ – then the very year with which the Islamic calendar begins, 622, may originally have been commemorated in celebration of Arab military expansion. This would also make it all the more ironic for anyone conquered by Arabs, and especially Iranians, to be a Muslim.
Still, the conquest of non-Arabs by Arabs is sanctified in Islam even if one utterly rejects the thesis Spencer propounds. Since the expansion of early Islam – and much of later Islam – was inseparable from Arab expansion into surrounding territories, being Muslim practically forces one to look back with approval on the conquests of non-Arabs by Arabs. (The spread of other world religions did not involve a comparable dependence on armed subjugation.) As Raymond Ibrahim has written, ‘the historic Islamic conquests are never referred to as “conquests” in Arabic and other Muslim languages; rather, they are futuhat—literally, “openings” for the light of Islam to enter.’
Throughout Islam’s history, jihadism and Islamic expansionism have gone hand in hand with Arab supremacism. This has perhaps been most apparent in Sudan and Mauritania, where Islamism has long been inextricably linked to racism and genocide against, and enslavement of, non-Arab blacks. Serge Trifkovic makes this point powerfully in The Sword of the Prophet, highlighting the irony of black Muslims in America who consider Islam a natural part of African heritage.
In addition to the racism already found in Islamic scriptures, the slave trade which has flourished under Islamic rule and been legitimised in conjunction with jihad ideology has also spawned racialist justifications. Trifkovic comments: ‘The Muslims’ view on their two main sources of slaves, sub-Saharan Africa and Slavic Eastern Europe, developed into the tradition epitomized by a tenth-century Islamic writer:
“The people of Iraq […] are the ones who are done to a turn in the womb. They do not come out with something between blond, blanched and leprous coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are […] black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with […] deficient minds, […] such as the Ethiopians and other blacks[.]”’
Islam’s Arab Character
Despite claims of divine revelation and the notion that the Qur’an existed from the beginning of time, Islamic doctrine is wholly permeated by mediaeval Arab culture and the paganism of pre-Islamic Arabia. Thus, Samuel Zwemer notes that the belief in jinn reflects a ‘substratum of paganism.’ Nor is this belief peripheral to Islam; numerous verses in the Qur’an discuss these supposed spirits and Muhammad is claimed, writes Zwemer, to have been ‘sent to convert the Jinn to Islam as well as the Arabs.’ It is also a well-known fact that the pilgrimage to Mecca goes back to pre-Islamic paganism.
The creed’s ethical teachings, furthermore, are deeply shaped by its origins among mediaeval Arabs. In many ways, it represents an alien culture imposed on other peoples by Arab conquest. One might object that Europe is Christian and Christianity is likewise an alien influence on it, having come from the Middle East. Yet Christianity’s Middle Eastern origins have been greatly exaggerated. It is a fundamentally European religion, having arisen in the Roman Empire and been shaped by Greek philosophy from its fount. Even pre-Christian Judaism had been heavily shaped by Hellenic thought, as Martin Hengel showed in his classic Judaism and Hellenism. In any event, Christianity is far less intrusive than Islam, which seems intent on micro-managing every aspect of the believer’s life.
An obvious example of how Islam imposes alien values on the societies it conquers is the role it mandates for women. Apostate Prophet, a German-American ex-Muslim of Turkish descent, avers that ‘the Turks […] treated their women much, much better before they converted to Islam.’ Current scholarship appears to bear this notion out. One author concludes that, in pre-Islamic times, ‘Turkish women ha[d] a much more free life than women of other communities and that women within Turkish communities [during that period] can be seen as sexless and they can take part in men’s positions.’ This is obviously far different from women’s role in Islamic societies. The difference was famously demonstrated by Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, founding member of the ruling Islamist group, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). On the occasion of the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr, Arınç urged Turks to pay greater heed to the Qur’an and stated that women should ‘not laugh in public.’ If conditions in Turkey are not as bad as in other Islamic countries, where practices like female genital mutilation are common, that is in large part thanks to the secularising revolution of Kemalism.
However, to say that Islam’s ethics fully reflect the norms of pre-Islamic Arabia would be unfair to the Arabs of the time. For instance, Ali Sina argues that, ‘prior to Islam, women in Arabia were more respected and had more rights than at any time since’ (Understanding Muhammad and Muslims). Even within the context of that undeveloped region, it seems that Islamisation represented a step back.
Islam’s Arab character has serious practical consequences which work to Arabs’ relative advantage and other groups’ relative disadvantage – although, naturally, adherence to Islam represents a net disadvantage for all groups. As Hugh Fitzgerald observes, Islam makes people ‘pray five times a day in the direction of Arabia (Mecca), ideally take Arab names, read the Qur’an in Arabic, and sometimes even construct a false Arab ancestry (as the “Sayeeds” of Pakistan).’ The requirement to fast throughout the day during Ramadan appears tailored to the Arabian Peninsula and is ill-suited to life in certain other regions. Moreover, Islam proves highly effective at funneling money from the whole Muslim world into Arabia. The required pilgrimage to Mecca earns Saudi Arabia ten to fifteen billion US dollars per annum; added to this are another four to five billion gained through ‘the umra, a non-obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca.’ ‘Pilgrimage income,’ adds the same source, ‘also accounts for the second largest share of [Saudi] government revenue after hydrocarbon sales.’
Will the Awakening Come?
‘Although Islam presents itself as a universal religion,’ writes Robert Spencer, ‘it has a decidedly Arabic character’ which has consistently aided ‘Arabic supremacists’ in Muslim areas. As stated, Islam is detrimental to all people, but it seems especially absurd that any non-Arab would be a Muslim. Hopefully, the other nations ensnared by this ideology will find the backbone to break free of it sooner rather than later.
Some such stirrings, though faint, can already be seen. As of this writing, Apostate Prophet’s video Islam is for Arabs has garnered nearly 200,000 views in five years. We have noted the distaste for Islam among many Algerian Berbers, and a similar pattern has been recorded in Morocco: ‘for some Berbers, conversion [to Christianity] is a return to their own roots.’ Should this trend continue, it could, in theory, become quite significant. As of 2000, Arabs constituted only 44% of Morocco’s population, just under the combined share of Arabised Berbers (24%) and other Berbers (21%).
Iran is an even more promising case. As mentioned, it appears that most of the country’s population is no longer Muslim. National pride seems to have played a part in this spectacular sea change, as evidenced by the popularity of Zoroastrianism among some Iranians. Perhaps Iran, once liberated, could act as a model for other non-Arab Muslim countries with a sense of dignity.
The national issue may not prove potent enough to de-Islamise societies completely. However, that may not be required. A major tipping point could be achieved simply by reaching a point at which criticism of Islam can no longer be stifled. Islam’s success depends on fear to prevent people from opposing it. Thus, in environments where adherence to it is not socially enforced – for instance, in Western societies –, deconversion rates tend to be high. Anywhere the compulsion to obey Islam is defeated, the main battle will have been won.
