The Visible, Gradual Surrender of Sovereignty

Hans-Peter Raddatz is a German scholar who specializes in Islam, sharia, and the Middle East. He was interviewed on Deutschlandradio last Saturday on the topic “Wildly escalating financial influence from Islam.”

Many thanks to JLH for the translation (see the bottom of this post for links to previous translations of Hans-Peter Raddatz):

Raddatz Considers Muslim Brotherhood Incapable of Democracy

Orientalist warns of growing influence of Islam in Europe

Given their interpretation of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood is not equipped for democracy, says Hans-Peter Raddatz. That is, Muslims, who are raised in a very religious environment are not free in the exercise of their will. So the democratic rules of play in Europe are “frayed away” by Muslim immigrants.

[The interviewer is Jürgen Liminski.]

Liminski:   It was a relatively calm night in Cairo. The situation is tense, the country is divided, but the Muslim Brotherhood is apparently in the weaker position, not only because their call is bringing fewer people to the street than the great mass of people who have tasted freedom and the might of the Street after Mubarak’s fall. No, most important of all, the military has made up its mind, and is clearly on the side of the people.

Almost exactly a year ago to the day, the president of Egypt at that time announced the dismissal of the head of the military and the chief of the secret service, abrogated the prerogatives of the military in relation to the president and assumed new full powers himself. The military was caught off-guard, and democracy on the Nile shanghaied. Are the Muslim Brotherhood and its form of Islam even capable of democracy? And if not, what is the prospect for the Islamic population in Europe? To discuss these and other questions, I welcome the Islam scholar Hans-Peter Raddatz, His latest work, a translation of the Egyptian-born historian, Bat Ye’or, is entitled Europe and the Coming Caliphate. Good morning, Mr. Raddatz.
 

Raddatz:   Good morning, Mr. Liminski.
 
Liminski:   Mr. Raddatz, things are still tense in Cairo. Is the Muslim Brotherhood incapable of democracy?
 
Raddatz:   That is a very clear question which must, all in all, be answered “No,” because the democratic constitution is not the banner under which the Muslim Brotherhood has marched for almost 100 years. Its task is the re-establishment of the laws of Allah in the Islamic states.
 
Liminski:   What I asked — perhaps “incapable of democracy” — you said “No,” so you are saying…
 
Raddatz:   Pardon…naturally they are not capable of democracy because they represent the law of Allah, the well-known sharia. Sorry.
 
Liminski:   But the president was legally and democratically elected.

Raddatz:   I will leave that an open question. Not everyone is convinced that the elections took place under the right conditions. If they did, then that would simply have been the first step in a long process whose conclusion is by no means democracy, but first an uncertain phase, perhaps even broken up by civil war. It is not as if the Muslim Brotherhood had less influence than the strength of the people. The strength of the people is composed very much of the strength of Islam. That is, we are confronting a very unclear situation which, in Egypt’s case, is just now being controlled by the army. The army is the force — new and not new, but new in these prevailing circumstances — which has come forward to control this confusing situation. And which, of course, is under the heavy influence of the Western powers.
 
Liminski:   If, as you say, Islamists are principally incapable of democracy, what is the situation with Muslims in Europe?
 
Raddatz:   The first basic assumption must be that they grew up under Islamic principles, that is, strenuously religious and indeed dictatorially religious conditions, and now in Europe, they are under the prevalent Islamic representatives. This means not absolutely free to make their own decisions. In this regard, it may be assumed — and there are many indicators of it — that naturally Western, liberal democratic influence is making itself felt. On the other hand, we must not forget that there are strong collaborative structures between Islamic representatives and European political ruling classes, and this is the central consideration of the book you just mentioned Europe and the Coming Caliphate. The central point of this book is that we are confronting a very, very difficult situation. Essentially, we have an increasing mass of immigrants of Islamic background, and simultaneously a growing, hardly insignificant influence of its representatives on the indigenous ruling classes in Europe and the United States. Finally, do not forget the wildly escalating financial influence from Islam through world organizations like OIC (Organization for Islamic Cooperation). And the great enterprises, the global concerns in which Muslim investors participate so heavily and in increasing measure, including the refinancing of the EU states, play a very important role.
 
Liminski:   Mr. Raddatz…
 
Raddatz:   Yes. Pardon me.
 
Liminski:   The book — we want to mention that it is published by Duncker and Humblot — has the subtitle: “Islam and the Radicalization of Democracy.” Does that mean that it is not Islam that is changing, but democracy? What is changing in it?
 
Raddatz:   That is a very important question. Democracy in general in Europe has long since changed, in the sense that the parties, not only in Germany, but in all the larger EU countries, have become so standardized that Islamic interpretation forms the central point of EU foreign policy. So people like Solana and Delors and later of course Barroso and company are constantly announcing that Islam and the region of Islam are the center of EU foreign policy. And the author of this book offers seamless documentation of how this has happened. Here it is possible to recognize that democratic rules of play — without even being directly nudged by Islam — have been worn away by the visible, gradual surrender of the sovereignty of EU countries to the EU.

The EU itself, especially the Commission, as is universally known, is not even elected. To that extent, we are faced with a very diffuse structure which excludes us 500 million Europeans.
 

Liminski:   One more, short question — we still have a minute. Is this the famous “clash of civilizations” or a diffuse clash?
 
Raddatz:   In my estimation, that is not so much a clash, because the mass of the population is becoming more and more politically incapable and has other priorities. There is a gradual melding of interests at the upper levels, and the elites of Islam, Europe and America and elsewhere can — like all elites through history — come to terms without any religious influence. At the level of the elites, religion plays only a secondary role.
 
Liminski:   Islam scholar, Hans Peter Raddatz. With Bar Ye’or, he has authored the book, “Europe and the Coming Caliphate.” Many of this morning’s subjects can be read about in greater detail there. Thank for your time. Mr. Raddatz.
 
Raddatz:   My pleasure.

Previous posts by or about Hans-Peter Raddatz:

2011   Mar   6   Is Secularization Possible in Islamic Countries?
2012   Dec   30   Europe and the Coming Caliphate: The Political-Cultural Scenario
        31   Europe and the Coming Caliphate: European Mufti-ism
2013   Jan   1   Europe and the Coming Caliphate: Dhimmitude versus Islamophobia
        2   The Profit for Islam from the Reduction of Thought
 

12 thoughts on “The Visible, Gradual Surrender of Sovereignty

  1. I was the Messenger for this 17 years ago! I was ignored and jeered for clearly predicting what is happening today……They proverbially still shoot me daily…

    Our children simply do not want to understand…So what is left for us ”oldies” who recall democracy to do….?

    Oblige these morons and shoot ourselves? My best chum already did with a 12 bore last year…He simply could take no more.

    I have spent my life studying how civilsations fall. I never thought I would experience it directly….

    All we have left is God amd he doesn’t seem terribly interested….

    And frankly I can sympathise with him….

    We have free will. Moslems don’t. We don’t want to use that free will, so our young people are well on the way to become ”Borg”.

    Dear Lord I am glad I am an old man….It is too painful to watch….

    • Father, I respect your belief and hope you can gain some balance as regards how you can rationalise that God works. If God truly made mankind in his own image we have all the tools we need to solve any problem and need not despair.

      Islam can be justifiably criticised as having many faults, both as a religion and political, totalitarian theocracy. We know well its faults and what the future holds for all Western Democratic nations. We need solutions. Direct democracy and compulsory voting are I think that solution – before a democratic majority emerges that decides to use their democratic vote to remove democracy and impose the sharia upon every nation – but then losing their ruling authority would not favour our ruling elites would it? They would rather continue down the road to civilisational genocide of their own people.

  2. Fantastic article!

    “At the level of the elites, religion plays only a secondary role.”

    Throughout history, the elites have made arrangements with each other. Under the Islamic occupation of Spain the Bishops would deliver the virgins annually in the ‘courtyard of the virgins” and were allowed to continue to exploit the Christian peasants.

    But in the final analysis, Islam remains while everything else disappears. Very obvious in Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and all those parts of the world where the rule of the meshugga prophet conquered.

  3. The significance of this interview is where it was published. Deutschlandradio is not just an obscure local station, it is Germany’s equivalent of BBC Radio, the primary state run radio station available country wide. The interview was not just published as text on the website, it was actually aired 3 days ago.

  4. Islamism’s likely doom by Daniel Pipes

    As recently as 2012, it appeared that Islamists could overcome their many internal dissimilarities — sectarian (Sunni, Shiite), political (monarchical, republican), tactical (political, violent) or attitudes toward modernity (Salafi, Muslim Brotherhood) — and cooperate. In Tunisia, for example, Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood types found common ground. Differences between all these groups were real but secondary, as I put it then, because “all Islamists pull in the same direction, toward the full and severe application of Islamic law (the Shariah).”
    […]

    …Should this divisive tendency hold, the Islamist movement is doomed, like fascism and communism, to be no more than a civilizational threat inflicting immense damage but never prevailing. This possible limit on Islamist power, which became visible only in 2013, offers grounds for optimism but not for relaxation. Even if things look brighter than a year ago, trends can quickly turn around again. The long and difficult job of defeating Islamism remains ahead.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/22/islamisms-likely-doom/

  5. The problem with elite classes is that they are inevitably going to be insulated from the harsh realities which shape the basic attitudes and aptitudes of those people who must actually do the work to produce wealth from natural resources. The elites live in a world where negotiation, deception, and coercion are the basis for accumulating wealth. They may deal incidentally with the concerns of those who actually have experience of the natural world, but then primarily from the perspective of trying to get the wealth produced, not learn how it was produced. It is worth noting that, in the modern university, the success of a physicist is more related to the persuasive skills necessary to obtain grants, administrate a lab, and publish frequently than to the ability to objectively run a controlled experiment. And most elites are nowhere near as close to dealing with the natural world as physicists.

    As an elite grows more securely entrenched in power, their ability to avoid having to deal with the harsh realities of the natural world is increased. Over time, this leads to the rise of a generation of elites who have never had to deal with the vagaries of nature except in the most carefully tamed (which is to say, artificial) of settings. And this divorce of their experience from anything resembling reality ultimately leads the elite to make decisions which seem perfectly reasonable from their own experience but which completely ignore fundamental natural laws.

    The current crop of Western elites have subscribed to a view of economics which is based entirely on abstract number-crunching or even vague notions of “confidence”, while being heavily influenced by sociological theories that completely ignore real human nature and human needs. And the economy built around those fabulous fictions is on the verge of total collapse, even without external pressures from various dangers that the elites ignored as distractions from the construction of their perfect utopia.

    Whether or not religion is just instinctive or reasonable, it is the natural human response to the natural world. The reason that elites are not really very concerned about religion is because for them it is not a foundational impulse that emerges from contact with the natural world but rather merely another malleable theoretical framework around which to base one’s efforts to manipulate others. To encounter the real world is to feel a vast inferiority to it, a humility that results in a religious experience not subject to negotiation. The lack of real conviction among the elite, whether expressed as mere secularism, urbane atheism, or a flexibly sophistic religion, is a sign of their inexperience with a natural world that doesn’t readily submit to human desires.

    The religious are capable of experiencing “miracles” precisely because they know that reality is usually not so accommodating. When the worst doesn’t happen, it’s an inexplicable event that can only be explained by reference to some power superior to the natural world. But in the experience of the elite, things go their way (or not) based entirely on human factors, they have no dealings with unmediated nature, where a human life can be snuffed out or irrevocably altered in an instant by insignificant events.

    Such insignificant events are about to occur.

  6. Quote:
    … that is, Muslims, who are raised in a very religious environment are not free in the exercise of their will.
    end

    Yes.
    Just, yes.

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