The Inadequacy of Mark Steyn's Analysis

Mark Steyn has written tirelessly, since 9-11, about the multiculturalist left's failure to adequately comprehend the threat posed to the West by Islamic extremism. What he himself has consistently failed to do however is to spell out precisely what measures an adequate response to this threat would entail.

This recent speech, made during his his much-publicised Australian tour, gives a clearer picture than before of what he believes is the fundamental nature of the crisis we face, how he believes we’re failing to meet that crisis, and what he believes we must do in order to meet it.

It isn’t all explicitly stated, —it seldom is with Steyn— but there’s enough here to fill in the blanks. The key is the analogy he makes to the outlawing by British imperialists of the barbaric former Hindu practice of Suti, i.e. burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The fact that this practice then fell by the wayside seems evidence enough to Steyn of the transformative power of confident unapologetic assertions of the superiority of Western values.

Hence, if only we would re-affirm these fundamental values, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t, with similar steadfastness, make it clear to Muslim immigrants what aspects of their culture (honour killings, jihad, etc.) are incompatible with civilized standards of behaviour. After which, presumably, there'll no longer be any obstacle to successful Muslim assimilation.

(Meanwhile, Bush's grand democratisation project will eventually bring them up to scratch in their own part of the world too, thus neutralizing the Islamic threat from abroad as well as at home.)

In the past Steyn has defined himself as a 'culturist', i.e. as someone who believes that it's perfectly valid to make discriminative judgements between cultures on the basis of the beliefs and customs which characterize, or are prevalent in, those cultures, but here he is implicitly saying that you can only take cultural discrimination so far:

Whatever appalling aspects a culture has to it, these will be abandoned or become marginalised so long as they are forcefully dealt with, and so long as the culture which tacitly approves of them is confronted with the alternative of civilized values confidently expressed.

But this whole line of reasoning is facile - how does Steyn's idea of cultural transformation under assertive Western influence fit in with, for example, the reversion to form throughout Africa no sooner had the colonialists departed? Aren't some cultures evidently more transformable than others?

As to Steyn's specific analogy, was Suti a bedrock principle, a sine qua non, of Hinduism? Obviously not. Does he not think things might not have been a little different if, in Hindu scripture, all the most revered gods had been said to have practiced Suti themselves and had stated in no uncertain terms that their followers forever after must do the same?

Well, the intolerance practised in Islam's name does indeed have such a bedrock scriptural basis, because both the Koran and the hadith, as well as more than a millenium of undisputed orthodox jurisprudence, all are in agreement that it is the sacred duty of muslims to wage jihad against infidels until the whole world has submitted to Islam ('Islam' literally meaning 'submission' not 'peace').

Of course, not all muslims will act on Islam's core supremacist principles. But those 'moderates' who don't actively engage in or support jihad have no theological basis upon which to deny the validity of aggressive jihad, and so resort instead, either from chauvinism or wishful thinking or plain ignorance of their own religion, to claiming that Islam is something that it is not, and whining about being victims of Islamophobia whenever anyone attempts to warn against Islam's actual teachings.

All of which means that the existence of 'moderate muslims' does not alter one iota the fact that Islam is non-transformable. On the contrary, they actually exacerbate the jihadist threat by misrepresenting its root cause as something benign, and so serve to distract us from truly understanding the implacable nature of the enemy we face.

What this also means is that Steyn's central thesis simply does not stand up to scrutiny.