OC 1/26/23

Swedish meatball

Swedish meatball

Can I get fries with that? [Source]

The Turks—our prickly NATO allies—are throwing a fit over rude behavior on the part of a Danish provocateur in Stockholm the other day. Now the Turks, headed by populist-cum-authoritarian president Erdogan, are demanding the Swedes violate their own sovereign laws on speech and protest so as not to offend Islam.

At his aptly titled

It Can Always Get Worse

newsletter, Kyle Orton gives us a refresher course on how we got here:

In classical Islam, there was disagreement about whether a Muslim in the lands of unbelief was bound by the shari’a. For a long time, this was mostly theoretical: it was inconceivable that a Muslim would voluntarily move to infidel territory and with Islam advancing into Christendom, the only cases that arose were the occasional captive. It became more of an issue after the tenth century as the imperial tide began to turn and Islam was forced back in Iberia and southern Italy, leaving Muslim populations under Christian rule. In general, the ideal remained that Muslims would return to Islamdom as soon as possible, either travelling there themselves or living as best they could until Islamic armies reconquered these zones.

What was never in doubt among any of the various Islamic jurists was that the shari’a could not be applied to non-Muslims living under non-Muslim governments.

This understanding was challenged and changed by the former Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, when he issued his death penalty to the London-based writer Salman Rushdie for blasphemy in 1989. Even though Rushdie lived outside the Muslim world, he was himself Muslim, and thus required to live in a accordance with Islamic law. And anyone who helped him in publishing his offending work would also be subject to sanction, no matter their religion.

Orton nicely condenses the back-and-forth between western and Muslim-world hotheads since then. You can almost hear the sigh:

There is no reason to doubt that the [ruling Turkish] AKP [party] and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are sincerely opposed to Qur’an burnings, but they have also found this a convenient pretext to try to make the Swedish government break other Swedish laws, around the judicial process of extradition, and to hold Sweden’s NATO membership hostage to this demand.

Read the whole thing.

Bear in mind, too, that Sweden would be a welcome alliance member with an impressive and unique defense industry all its own. But instead of adding that to our collective defense, we’ll have to endure more of the geo-psycho-diplo clown show for the time being.

The annoying contrast, of course, is between the way Muslim-world governments behave toward western democratic countries that accord equal human rights to their Muslim citizenry and how the same governments have nothing critical to say against the genocidal government of the Chinese Communist Party. The latter’s campaign of extermination against their Muslim Uyghur minority goes practically unremarked by Islamic governments, but there is no known insult against Islam by so much as a single western citizen that can’t inspire stern diplomatic rebukes and possible mob riots.

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Regarding Kyle Orton, I can’t exactly recall when and how I first came across his analysis, but it’s been a few years now that I’ve been following his Twitter feed. He is a history scholar based in the UK. If you’re interested in a feed of headlines pertaining to East-West conflict—whether between Islam and Christendom or Russia and NATO—he provides a nice rundown of the most recent events, as well as furnishing some historical context. I also recommend his Substack newsletter linked above, where he colors in more of the background at greater length on select occurrences.