How Nationalism Can Solve the Crisis of Islam
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By Sohrab Ahmari,
Transnational liberalism breeds resentments and anxieties that are only beginning to surface across the developed world.
Last Sunday President Trump stood before Muslim leaders in Riyadh and declared: “America is a sovereign nation, and our first priority is always the safety and security of our citizens. We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.”
Amid the journalistic uproar that greets nearly everything Mr. Trump says, few noted the connection he made between these two concepts: We are sovereign, and we don’t want to lecture. By putting them together, the president scrambled the pattern that has long shaped the West’s relations with Islam.
For decades, the West has seen itself as an empire of rights and liberal norms. There were borders and nations, but these were fast dissolving. Since rights were universal, the empire would soon encompass the planet. Everyone would belong, including Muslims, who were expected to lose their distinctness.
It didn’t work, as the latest jihadist attack, at a concert for teens in Manchester, England, attests. So it makes sense to consider alternatives. Judging by his Saudi speech, Mr. Trump wants to revive the nation-state as the primary political vehicle for encountering Islam. The nation has clear—and limited—territorial and cultural boundaries. It says we are this, and you are that.
To the French philosopher Pierre Manent, such thinking is the beginning of wisdom. “We have a big problem with Islam,” he tells me. “And it’s impossible to solve it through globalist, individualist, rights-of-man mantras.”
I meet Mr. Manent, 68, in his office at the prestigious School for Advanced Social Studies in Paris. For years he has been associated with the school’s Raymond Aron Center for Political Research, named for the great Cold War liberal who denounced Soviet tyranny even as most French thinkers grew addicted to what Aron called the “opium of the intellectuals”—Marxism and radicalism. Aron was Mr. Manent’s mentor.
Although Mr. Manent has retired from teaching, he still writes and lectures across Europe, mainly on how to preserve political freedom and liberal order in the face of globalization, mass migration and Islam. His ideas have wide application in the West.
Here in France, the government has vowed to counter Islamist terror with a military and intelligence surge. But newly elected President Emmanuel Macron generally eschews the more profound, unresolved questions of community and belonging that haunt French society. “There is no such thing as a single French culture,” he said in February. “There is culture in France, and it is diverse.”
These glib assertions lead Mr. Manent to conclude that Mr. Macron has fully imbibed the “acceptable opinions, or the PC opinions,” about Islam and nationhood that prevail among trans-Atlantic elites. In these circles, even to suggest a problem with Islam is to invite “scowls,” he says. “Everything they say about the situation is determined by their purpose, which is to prove that there is no problem with Islam—against their own anxiety.” Not to mention the evidence.
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