The intractable, insidious conflict between Islamism and the West

What is so frightening about the religious energies that have built an Islamic state in Iran and now work to establish a Sunni caliphate around Raqqa are the way they have exalted martyrdom to a new place in this extreme version of the Islamic religion. The determination to commit yourself to a suicide attack is to announce your power over the world — and your power to lay down your life. It is to finally stand above the others who merely tolerate you, who go out on a Friday night for pleasure and later run screaming from the danger that you have become.

And so there is no “just [something]” solution. The West and Islamism are trapped in a set of interlocking hostilities. European nations have found no sure way of integrating their large and growing Muslim populations, no way of making them part of the institutionalized bargains that underpin the Western order. Their societies are thus machines for creating alienation. Meanwhile, Islamic reformers have not found a way to make various strains of Islamism more liberal and tolerant in spirit while Islamic civilization remains marginal as a global geopolitical force. And the process of globalization, brought on by Western power, brings Western offenses to the Islamic world, and offended Muslims into the Western world.

If we are looking for a “just [something]” solution, the something has got to be much, much bigger. A revolution within Islamist theology and self-conception. Or a complete change of character and ideology for European nations.