The following speech was given by Professor Tilman Nagel at the annual convention of Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE) in Germany last week. JLH, who has kindly translated it into English for Gates of Vienna, includes this introductory note:

There are two things about this speech that are important.

First, Salafism is the purist intellectualism behind the contemporary jihad movement. As Nagel notes, the name itself is based on the name for “ancestors.” And because the Salafists have made themselves such a visible and aggressively proselytizing force in Germany, the Germans are more aware of them than any other Western nation. Nagel meticulously — with almost painful care — builds a picture of their thought, step-by-step, moving inward to the core of it.

Second, our Founders, and those who immediately followed them, were Christian or deist, raised in a Judaeo-Christian society, and religious men, yet they had a unique vision which transcended the boundaries of their own beliefs to imagine a government unshackled by any one religion, and many religions unshackled by government.

The juxtaposition of the purist Islamic No-Think Ideology to the basic No Ideology Thinking of the early US explains why this contest between the West and Islam is our battle more than anyone else’s. The outer defenses have been breached. Britain — the birthplace of so much of our thinking — is prostrate on a rack of political correctness. France — our other mentor through the ages — is at war with itself. Germany — the original model for much of our educational system — is stubborn but bowed under Islamist-Leftist pressure. After blurring our image and befuddling even the allies who love to hate us, we are busily tearing up the last evidence of American Exceptionalism.

When, and if, we can recover enough of our character in the next years, we will be every bit as much the arsenal of democracy that we were in WWII. If not, we will become one more outpost of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the only contest remaining will be between Marxist tyranny and ideological absolutism.

The translated speech, as posted at the BPE blog:

What Is Salafism?

June 9, 2013

We publish below, with his kind permission, the manuscript of the lecture given by Professor Tilman Nagel at the annual convention of Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa on June 8, 2013 in Fulda.

A. Preliminary Remarks

Our judgments about the present-day Islamic world almost always suffer from two deficiencies. First, they arise from the foundation of our own past and history of ideas, whose results are definitive for us today, and are seen as universally valid. Within this universally recognized history, outcomes are sought which could be solutions to the phenomena which now need evaluation. A familiar example is the civilizational backwardness of many Islamic countries. The very concept of backwardness conceals within itself the pre-condition that our own, European conditions are the valid standard. And the cause of the backwardness? From this perspective, it cannot lie in those countries themselves — in their dominant culture. It must trace back to obstacles which made it impossible for them to develop concurrently with us. These obstacles must have come from the outside, since they can by definition not be endogenous in nature. The development of power in the West, tagged with the shibboleths “imperialism” and “colonialism,” is offered as the possible model for an “explanation.”

A comparable model of evaluation is used for Salafism. This is the case even in serious studies, such as Laurent Murawiec’s The Mind of Jihad. The author knows very well that a so-called classic jihad does exist, but it is not an object of basic consideration for him. The Islamic world, he says, rejected the challenge of modern civilization and instead opened itself to the darker side of that civilization — bolshevism and fascism. And these totalitarian currents awakened the Muslim memory to movements deep in the past, which desired the realization of Allah’s empire by an end-of-days battle. Murawiec is thinking of the subversive Shi’ite groups which from time to time brought new dynasties to power, who saw themselves as the fulfillers of end-of-days expectations, for example, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the Safavids. Both the British and the Germans , he says, made use of such memories in their Near Eastern policies during WWI. At any rate, the idea that legitimate political goals could only come through force was self-evident to the early fighters for a resurgence of the Islamic world. They championed the idea that a return to the mindset of their forefathers — Arabic, as-salaf — was unavoidable for the purposes of this resurgence. In the course of the 20th century, according to Murawiec, the disinclination of the “salafi movements” to have anything to do with the ideas of the West grew ever stronger. They began to reject and vilify everything that had to do with the “West.”

Murawiec, however, writes his study on the basis of English-language secondary literature, which is naturally plentiful for the events of the 20th century. Insufficient command of the language and a fondness for the statements of present-day political science make him nearly blind to the autochthonic, Islamic roots of both contemporary jihad and Salafism, which is a marginal subject in his estimation. Such ignorance makes it easy for Muslims to deny to Western interlocutors that the use of force to convert infidels is inherently Islamic behavior. The true Islamic jihad, they say, is a personal struggle and only assumed a bellicose character as a reply to the Crusades. At any rate, Murawiec suspects that violence against those who believe or think differently has its own Islamic history which remains potent. There is, he says, no firewall between the Muslims who endorse the Final Battle and the broad mass of Islam. The Koran and the Hadith contain passages which can be interpreted that way.

My concern in this lecture is this Islam of the masses and the embedding in their belief system of so-called Salafism. I hope to point the way to a sober and factually based judgment of the political-religious questions we face — whether we admit it or not — because of the mass immigration of Muslims into our freedom-based, secular society. The Salafist intensification of such problems absolutely does not stem from a kind of sectarianism. Above all, it argues that there can be no question of Islam finding a home in Europe.

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