As I write this essay the headlines are dominated by the resignation of Senator Fatima Payman from the Labor Party. No doubt Labor believed they had scored a cultural victory by recruiting a young Muslim woman to their ranks thus demonstrating their “woke” diversity credentials. In retrospect they might come to rue her appointment as an own goal.

Payman was initially admonished by the Prime Minister for supporting a Green’s motion proposing the establishment of a Palestinian State and banned from participating in Caucus for a week.. In the past crossing the floor in defiance of the Party would have resulted in immediate expulsion from the Party . What’s more any person who committed such a traitorous act (in the eyes of the Labor Party) would have been called a “rat” (and much worse) and ostracised and pilloried by Labor stalwarts until the end of their days.

Soon after her rebuke by the Prime Minister, Payman was asked if the motion in support of a Palestine State was moved again, would she again cross the floor in support. She answered in the affirmative. As a result she was permanently expelled from Caucus until such time as she agreed to toe the Party line.

The Labor Party’s initial reticence to take strong action against Payman is due to the fact that a half dozen or so Labor members represent seats that have substantial Muslim minorities. Consequently the Government has been loath to do anything that might offend these constituents.

Now this is not just something endemic to Australia, our Western values and ideals are being compromised to placate Muslim minorities in most Western countries. It is pertinent to ask why this is so.

If we go back to the example of Fatima Payman we find some interesting and disturbing influences. Payman is a daughter of Afghanistan refugees. Indeed she holds dual Australian and Afghanistani citizenship. Presumably they fled Afghanistan because of the extremist beliefs of the Islamists that run that country. This is a country where women are suppressed, homosexuals are executed and freedom of expression is curtailed. The Islamists that run Afghanistan are not discernibly different from the Islamists that run Hamas in Gaza. But Payman seems keen to provide support to them in aiding their aspirations for Palestine. In support of her, four demonstrators breached security to drape banners over the entrance to Parliament House promoting pro-Palestinian sentiments.

There are plenty of examples of how our governments pussyfoot around the issues of Muslim assertivism into our way of life. When Hamas invaded Israel and committed atrocities that were appalling to most of us, pro-Palestinian Islamist extremists celebrated the atrocities. Muslim extremist Imams were jubilant and broadcast their hatred of the Jews unashamedly in public forums. The authorities took no action to curtail the hate speech that ensued. There was a vile demonstration at the Sydney Opera House where anti-Semitic protestors spouted vile insults about Jews. There was no doubt this was hate speech but the authorities did nothing in response.

There has been a marked reluctance for both State and Federal Governments to take action against these Muslim extremists. The Federal Labor government is frightened there may be a political reaction by Muslims if they enforce the law on these issues and it has a considerable number of Labor members who depend on the support of Muslim voters.

(There is a marked difference between the police response to Islamist violence and hate speech and the way they prosecuted ordinary citizens who dared to infringe the draconian restrictions imposed by governments in response to Covid!)

Now this is not an isolated example. Throughout the West we see Western ideals and values being compromised to accommodate Muslim minorities. In many such countries traditional cultures are under threat as a result.

Let us examine our history to try to understand how this disturbing trend has eventuated.

But before we do let me say that many Australian Muslims are ideal citizens and contribute well to our society. My criticism is not of them but of the extremists we have come to call Islamists.

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The religion of Islam was founded by Muhammad. According to tradition, Muhammad whilst living in Mecca around 510 AD, received a series of revelations purportedly from the Archangel Gabriel acting as an intermediary for Allah. Although struggling initially to have an impact, eventually he consolidated a following of supporters and succeeded in uniting the Arab tribes. He then began a successful military campaign designed to evangelise the religion he had created.

Muhammad lived from c. 570 – 632 AD. A little more than a hundred years after the death of the Prophet, Muslim scholars began to assemble the great collections of Muhamad’s sayings (abadith) and customary practice (sunnah), which would form the basis of Muslim law.

As religious historian Karen Armstrong has written:

The Sunnah taught Muslims to imitate the way that Muhammad spoke, ate, loved, washed, and worshipped, so that in the smallest details of their daily existence, they reproduced his life on earth in the hope that they would acquire his internal disposition of total surrender to God.

Thus Islam seems determined to perpetuate the mores of a seventh century illiterate Arab.

The Koran was subsequently compiled from this material. Given the long period (perhaps 100 years or so between its compilation and the death of Muhammad) there is naturally some speculation about its authenticity. But in any event Islam prospered whilst at the same time Christianity receded into the Dark Ages.

The golden age of Islam occurred around 750 AD. At this period the Muslims had successfully conquered the Middle East, North Africa and a large part of Spain. However it was not just the territory that they controlled but the relative sophistication of the Islamic society that set it apart. Islam had preserved the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans that had been lost to the Europeans in the Dark Ages. It had fostered scholarship and trade. Under its protective umbrella science and mathematics prospered.

[Some Muslims have a dream of jame towhidi, the society of believers. This is a dream of recreating things as they had been in the earliest days of Islam, when the Prophet ruled, and the spiritual and the secular were one, and everything that was done by the as yet small community could be said to be serving the faith.]

Whist there was a resurgence of Christianity after the Renaissance; Islam is now the fastest growing religion. Islam predominates in such Middle Eastern countries as Iran, Iraq and Pakistan and Egypt. But most of the world’s Islamic population live in Asia. Indonesia has more Muslims than any other country. Countries dominated by Muslim populations include Turkey, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. There are also rapidly growing Muslim minorities in many European communities.

But a quick perusal of the heartland of Islam reveals Muslims now tend to occupy underdeveloped countries with low standards of living in sharp contrast with their glorious early history. This seems to have fostered a climate of resentment against those who are materially better off. As a result a movement has been created that agitates for a return to the past in the mistaken belief that this will somehow change things for the better. This movement which promotes aggressive action to achieve these ends is generally known as “Islamism”.

I read a story of a young man who fought for Iran in the war with Iraq (1980-1988). When speaking of the Islamists he fought alongside he said:

They are people who think they have lost something. They think the rich people have stolen it from them. So they can be aggressive.

Whilst Islamism means somewhat different things to different people, it refers most widely to an ideology that is aggressively anti-Western and promotes mediaeval Islamic practices. This movement has spawned such fundamentalist militant groups as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and of course al-Qaeda. One of Its most recent offshoots is the Islamic State which attempted to overthrow Syria and Iraq.

Islam is a religion based on what was purportedly revealed to Muhammad and later recorded in the Koran and the Hadith. Islamism, on the other hand is a political movement aimed at creating an Islamic state or even a transnational Caliphate.

Most Muslim states (Indonesia is a notable exception) have not embraced the Western notion of separating the church from the state and as a result have theocratic governments that tend to enforce the strict religious conventions of the founder of Islam. This has served to thwart the economic and political development of such states and is one of the reasons that Islamic countries are poorer and have fewer freedoms than Western countries.

In recent years, because of the upswell of Muslim migrants into Europe, we have seen the rise of Muslim political movements, which if allowed to propagate will inevitably test the separation of powers in European democracies. After the Payman affair, even here in Australia there is a move afoot to establish political movements based on Islam. These are worrying trends which will inevitably pose a threat to democratic fundamentals.

However, whilst Islamists believe they are returning their beliefs to norms established in their golden age, some scholars of religion maintain that their beliefs come from more recent sources. Stephen Prothero, chair of the department of religion at Boston University, points out that Islamic fundamentalism is actually a modern invention, (as in fact is also Christian fundamentalism), deeply influenced by the Western ideologies it seeks to oppose.

Prothero writes:

The greatest intellectual influence on [Islamism] is likely the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) who urged his followers to fight a holy war against secularism, democracy and the West. Islamism’s heroes are so-called martyrs, who, in violation of a clear Koranic prescription against suicide, blow themselves up for, among other things, promise of instant transport to Paradise. The villains are Israel and the “Great Satan”, the United States, but Islamists also denounce as evildoers (and apostates) fellow Muslims who interpret Islam in a more mainstream manner.

The joys of being subject to Islamism are evidenced by reports from Mosul in Iraq when it was over-run by forces of the Islamic State. Newspaper reports indicated that Christians in the city faced “death by the sword” if they did not convert to Islam or pay jizya, a special tax levied on non-Muslims. There were reports in the press that the Islamist militants that had over-run the town had decreed that all females between the ages of 11 and 46 must be subject to genital mutilation.

In its main stronghold in Syria, the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State was reported as having crucified Christians for disobeying orders, of cutting off the hands of accused thieves in public and killing all those who are considered more serious offenders.

In such communities Sharia law prevails. As a consequence women are suppressed, not having the same rights as men under the law, forbidden education, not allowed out of their abodes unless accompanied by a family member and compelled to wear traditional clothing that virtually covers their entire bodies.

In the West we are inclined to be tolerant of people with different religious views. And it is entirely appropriate that we should allow Muslims the freedom to worship Allah in their traditional way. But it seems to me that we should be very circumspect in allowing Islamists, who seek to compel others to believe in Islam and enshrine in law their mediaeval beliefs, to do as they will. In doing so, we threaten democracy and the benefits of modern Western societies. When we tolerate this we are not so much supporting diversity as curtailing our freedom.

Until relatively recent times the prime struggle for Islam was with Christianity. The relationship between Islam and Christianity has had a variable history. The struggle to dominate Jerusalem, for example, occupied the ambitions of both religions with terrible consequences. The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in in 637. The Christians took it back in 1099. But they were forced to relinquish it again to the Muslims when the legendary Muslim hero, Saladin, again prevailed in1187.

After the Renaissance the West began to prosper again, Advances in science, mathematics, physics and medicine saw a steady increase in the wealth of Western countries and a gradual improvement in longevity. On the other hand Islamic countries, weighed down by their medieval beliefs’ stagnated. Over the ensuing centuries as Western countries prospered. Islamic countries began to resent their better lifestyles and rationalised their comparative disadvantage as a consequence of Western oppression.

Now in the last fifty years or so there has been considerable inner turmoil in Islamic countries. There are two major causes for this. The obvious one is the tensions between traditional Islamic beliefs and Western beliefs. But even more dramatically, it has been between the competing Muslim beliefs. Islamic terrorism has been more prevalent between the Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim sects than between Muslims and Westerners. And however much we deplore Islamist violence against the West, there have been far more causalities in the struggle between the two competing Muslim sects.

Some time ago I read of a study by the Pew Centre in the US which found that a solid majority of citizens in Muslim countries believed that the West was fundamentally hostile to Muslim countries. They also believed that the poverty experienced in Muslim countries was a deliberate ploy of the West to shame and humiliate Muslims.

Nevertheless turmoil in Muslim countries has resulted in a steady stream of refugees (and those pretending to be refugees into) into Western countries. This is particularly evident in European countries. This steady stream of Muslim immigrants has proved to be effectively cultural colonisers. They have watered down traditional European cultures and challenged many Western ideals.

This has been well documented by Douglas Murray in his perceptive book The Strange Death of Europe. Murray argues that this erosion of European culture has been aided by the tolerance that Western societies provide for people of all races and faiths. Now, I for one would not want to see this tolerance abated. It is one of the most wonderful precepts underpinning our liberal, democratic society. But it needs to be tempered when manifestations of such tolerance come to threaten those very same underpinnings of our liberal, democratic society.

Australia has not as yet yielded much of those democratic underpinnings to Islamic extremists as Europe has done. But the trend is clear. As I outlined in the beginning of this essay we have allowed great latitude to the Islamic extremists to rant vilely against the Jews without any consequences.

The Albanese government provides only lip-service support for Israel because they are in the thrall of the Muslim population. They recently anointed an Envoy to counter anti-Semitism. But in seeking to nullify criticism from the Muslim population, at the same time they announced they would shortly appoint another Envoy to counter Islamophobia. Yet whilst I have seen many examples of particularly vile anti-Semitism, I struggle to find examples of Islamophobia.

So just as in Europe, Australia too, under this pro-Palestinian Prime Minister is beginning to yield to the Muslim influence. You need to be very concerned that if such trends continue our democracy and our traditional values will be under threat!