Hussein Mansour writes about the way a sense of crisis has become a defining feature of Muslim thought:
“When a revolution fails, the conclusion is that the crisis was deeper than expected. When reform succeeds, the conclusion is that its success was merely cosmetic and the disease remains untouched. When the revolutionary vanguard turns into a tyranny, it means that it has been captured by the old mentality, and therefore the crisis continues. When the people reject the program, the rejection itself is a symptom of the disease. Every outcome confirms the diagnosis.”
Mansour further argues that this is not originally Islamic. Muslims, he says, borrowed it from nineteenth-century European political thought. They themselves regard it as authentic because the Islamic world has no historical scholarship in our sense of the term. Understandably so. Such scholarship could raise questions such as whether Muhammad even existed.
What is more interesting for us is that the same sense of crisis surrounds our own society. It is therefore fair to ask whether we are not in much the same position. There are, however, matters whose objective existence cannot be denied.
Migration. Masses of hostile and violent people are flowing into European countries, determined and capable of disrupting our civilizational order. Nothing comparable has ever happened in history without the country being occupied having first been defeated in war. And this madness is supported by a majority of the rich and powerful.
Education. Children are achieving increasingly poor results in every measurable area. Even in the one area that they supposedly set out to improve—the psychological well-being of children—there has been an objectively measurable deterioration.
Businesses. Manufacturing plants and power stations are being shut down without anything new taking their place.
None of this can be denied, nor can it be denied that these are typical symptoms of a crisis.
On the other hand, it does not necessarily follow that the crisis affects every area of life. Above all, it should not prevent us from recognizing that some things are not in crisis, or that conditions are improving in certain areas. This has practical consequences as well. People who believe that crisis is omnipresent and essentially irreversible are generally of little use in any effort to bring about improvement.
So:
- If migration were to stop and signs emerged that migrants were adopting the European way of life and worldview—for example, if research showed that the number of Muslims who regard Islamic scriptures as their highest authority were declining—we should acknowledge that developments in this area had ceased to constitute a crisis.
- If tests were eventually to show that schoolchildren’s abilities had begun to improve, we should acknowledge that the crisis in education had ended.
- If new factories with their own technical and intellectual infrastructure began to open, and if the number of jobs and the volume of production exceeded what was being lost through closures, we should acknowledge that such a crisis had ended.
And so on.